🇨🇦 Canada · Quebec
A little over half an hour from Quebec City, on the Beaupré coast, rises Mont-Sainte-Anne, one of the most important mountain resorts in eastern Canada. With a summit of around 800 meters and a considerable skiable vertical drop, it is famous for its winter alpine skiing, with floodlit runs for night skiing and views over the St. Lawrence River, and, in summer, for being an internationally recognized mountain biking mecca.
Mont-Sainte-Anne combines closeness to the provincial capital with a splendid natural setting. From its summits you look out over the wide St. Lawrence and Île d'Orléans, and in fall its slopes catch fire with color. It is an ideal base for pairing the mountain with nearby visits such as the shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, the spectacular Montmorency Falls or Canyon Sainte-Anne.
This guide covers the essentials of Mont-Sainte-Anne with a practical eye: what it offers in each season (skiing, biking, hiking, ziplines), how to get there from Quebec City, where to stay and what to visit around the Côte-de-Beaupré. An accessible, complete mountain destination, a step away from one of the most beautiful cities in North America.
Mont-Sainte-Anne developed as a ski resort in the 1960s, driven by the closeness of Quebec City, and soon established itself as one of the leading winter sports centers in eastern Canada. It takes its name from Saint Anne, patron saint of Quebec, venerated at the nearby shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. Over the years it added summer mountain biking, which led it to host world-class competitions such as the UCI World Cup. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Canada's great French-speaking province: cradle of New France, founded by Champlain in 1608, land of the St. Lawrence River, of the nationalist fervor of the Quiet Revolution and of a Latin, European culture unique in North America.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there was a single lift or a single downhill bike, the great mountain we now call Mont-Sainte-Anne was, quite simply, the backdrop to one of the oldest and most devout regions of New France. At its foot, on the Côte-de-Beaupré, a narrow strip of land between the St. Lawrence River and the first foothills of the Laurentian mountains, northeast of Quebec City, Breton sailors who feared being wrecked on the great river commended themselves to Saint Anne. In her honor, around the middle of the 17th century, they raised a chapel that over the centuries would become a pilgrimage shrine known across the Americas.
This region was one of the first areas of New France to be settled: as early as the 17th century French colonists established themselves along the coast, forming a succession of farming parishes still recognizable today in the towns of the area. The mountain and the whole territory owe their name to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary and patron saint of Quebec, whose cult sits at the very heart of the identity of the Côte-de-Beaupré.
For centuries, life in the region revolved around farming, fishing in the river and that intense religiosity. The great mountain, covered in forest and in snow much of the year, was a landscape you contemplated, not a destination you climbed. Its transformation into one of the great sporting centers of eastern Canada would come much later, well into the 20th century, and at the hands of a handful of pioneering skiers.
The skiing adventure at Mont-Sainte-Anne began in 1943, when a group of pioneering skiers set out to open the first runs on the mountain; in April 1944 the first skiers dropped down its slopes. But the great leap came in January 1966, when the mountain was officially opened as a ski resort, with four lifts, among them the only gondola in eastern Canada, and ten runs. Taking advantage of its closeness to Quebec City and the mountain's considerable vertical drop, the place quickly became one of the favorite winter destinations of the provincial capital and of the whole east of the country.
Over the years, the resort grew with new lifts, runs on several faces and an extensive cross-country ski system that came to be among the most important in Canada. Night skiing, with floodlit runs and views of the lights of Quebec City and the St. Lawrence, became one of its trademarks. Mont-Sainte-Anne even went on to host international ski competitions, cementing its sporting prestige across the continent.
Being close to a World Heritage city like Quebec gave the resort a unique advantage: the chance to combine mountain sport with cultural and culinary tourism, something rare among the big North American ski centers, often isolated deep in the mountains. That double card, quality snow and one of the most beautiful cities on the continent forty minutes away, is still its greatest draw today.
From the 1980s and 1990s on, Mont-Sainte-Anne added a second life in the warm season by betting heavily on mountain biking, then an emerging sport. Making use of its vertical drop and the gondola that already carried skiers in winter, the resort developed downhill and cross-country trails that soon drew the attention of the international circuit. In 1991 it hosted its first Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Mountain Bike World Cup, the start of a bond that would last decades.
Since then, the mountain has become one of the most emblematic venues on the world calendar: it hosted the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships three times, in 1998, 2010 and 2019, welcoming the best riders on the planet. That record earned it the nickname 'temple of mountain biking' and established Mont-Sainte-Anne as one of the best-known mountain biking destinations in Canada and in all of North America, with demanding, technical courses highly rated by the professionals.
Today Mont-Sainte-Anne is a four-season destination: alpine skiing, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in winter; mountain biking, hiking and adventure activities in summer and fall. Its combination of nature, top-level sport and closeness to Quebec City and to the attractions of the Côte-de-Beaupré keeps it among the most complete mountain tourism hubs in the east of the country.
Mont-Sainte-Anne cannot be understood without the Côte-de-Beaupré, the historic strip that surrounds it and that is one of the cradles of New France. The shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré is the spiritual soul of the region: the devotion to Saint Anne was born here in the 17th century and, according to tradition, the first miracles attributed to the saint go back to the building of a chapel around 1658. Over the centuries, successive churches gave way to the imposing neo-Romanesque basilica of today, raised in the 20th century after a fire, which receives more than a million pilgrims every year, making it one of the great shrines of North America.
Nearby Montmorency Falls (Chute Montmorency), 83 meters high, higher than Niagara Falls, was named in 1613 by Samuel de Champlain in honor of the Duke of Montmorency, viceroy of New France. An episode of the war between the French and the British for control of Quebec was fought around it in 1759. Today it is a park run by Sépaq and one of the most visited natural attractions in the province.
A few kilometers away, Canyon Sainte-Anne, a gorge carved by the Sainte-Anne-du-Nord River, completes the set of natural wonders in the area. That combination of religious heritage, colonial history and spectacular nature is what gave the region its identity long before the mountain became a ski resort, and what today lets the visitor pair mountain sport with a trip back to the origins of New France.