Captain Vancouver’s ancestral castle to become a hotel

COEVORDEN - The local castle once owned by the forebears of 17th century English explorer Captain George Vancouver will reopen as a luxury hotel in 2009. The municipality, which used the building as city hall for decades, has sold two adjoining heritage buildings to an area hotel operator who also will lease the castle. He guarantees that public functions such as wedding ceremonies, can continue to be held in the castle that in its earliest stages was built in the 11th century. A three-quarter sized replica of the castle of the Van Coevorden family was erected in Vancouver, BC, in 1986 for that city’s Expo86. Both the British Columbia city and a town in adjoining Washington state were named after the explorer whose parents had moved to England and eventually Anglicized changed their name.