Saint Pierre and Miquelon

Saint-Pierre — the capital of the French overseas collectivity of Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon (a French territory of 242km², population 6,000, 25km off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada — the only French territory in North America and the last remnant of the once-vast French colonial empire in North America) with Place du Général de Gaulle (the town square), the Musee de l’Arche (covering the island’s extraordinary history) and the distinctive French architecture.

💡 Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon is the last remnant of New France (the French colonial empire in North America that at its height in 1712 covered approximately 7.7 million km² from the Gulf of St Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico — lost in the Seven Years War to Britain in 1763, with Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon specifically retained by France in the 1763 Treaty of Paris as a fishing base). The islands have been French continuously since 1816 and remain constitutionally a part of France.

Saint-Pierre’s French food culture (a complete slice of provincial France transported to the North Atlantic — boulangeries producing authentic baguettes and croissants, a fromagerie with imported French cheeses, a wine shop with a full Bordeaux and Burgundy selection, Michelin-calibre cooking at the island’s restaurants, and the local fishermen delivering fresh cod, halibut and lobster to the market daily — the most thoroughly French culinary experience in North America).

💡 Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon is the only place in North America where the euro is the legal tender and France’s prices apply to goods — wine, cheese, foie gras and pate are at French supermarket prices, making the islands a popular destination for Newfoundland residents who cross by ferry to stock up on French provisions. The local bakeries produce French bread baked fresh twice daily, the only genuine French baguette available within 4,000km.

The Isthmus of Langlade (accessible by ferry from Saint-Pierre — the wild, uninhabited southern island connected to Miquelon village by a 10km sand isthmus, with the finest hiking in the territory, breeding populations of Arctic terns, northern gannets and storm petrels, the wreck cemetery on the Langlade coast (100+ ships wrecked on the isthmus in the era of sail, the most concentrated ship graveyard in the western North Atlantic) and the lake and peat bog landscapes of the island interior).

💡 The Langlade coast (the western shore of the Langlade peninsula, exposed to the full fetch of the Atlantic swell — has been the site of over 600 recorded shipwrecks since the early 16th century, the most concentrated collection of wrecks per kilometre of coastline in the North Atlantic. The combination of the Grand Banks fog, the shoal waters of the isthmus and the Atlantic current made the Langlade coast a consistent navigational death trap in the age of sail.

Whale watching from Saint-Pierre (July–September — the cold, nutrient-rich waters of the Grand Banks 40km east of the islands support exceptional marine life: humpback whales feeding on capelin and herring in the surface waters, fin whales, minke whales, blue whales (the largest animal ever to live), northern bottlenose dolphins and basking sharks — the finest accessible whale watching in the North Atlantic accessible from a town with excellent French restaurants).

💡 The Grand Banks (the continental shelf southeast of Newfoundland — among the most biologically productive ocean waters in the world, where the cold Labrador Current meets the warm Gulf Stream, creating upwelling of deep, nutrient-rich water that produces extraordinary concentrations of plankton, fish and marine mammals) supports the largest summer aggregation of humpback whales on the western North Atlantic seaboard.

The Prohibition era sites (Saint-Pierre was the primary smuggling hub for illegal alcohol into the USA and Canada during US Prohibition (1920–1933) — the island warehouses were packed with whisky, cognac and rum from France, offloaded to rum-runners for the crossing to the US coast; Al Capone himself visited the island in 1920; the island economy boomed and then collapsed with Prohibition’s end — covered at the Musee de l’Arche and in island oral history).

💡 Al Capone’s visit to Saint-Pierre (1920 — during the early Prohibition boom, Capone set up a rum-running operation from Saint-Pierre to supply his Chicago speakeasies, visiting the island personally to negotiate distribution deals with the French merchants — is one of the most distinctive historical footnotes in French North American history. The island’s Prohibition-era prosperity funded much of the current built environment.

The Ile-aux-Marins (the Sailors’ Island — a tiny uninhabited island 2km from Saint-Pierre, formerly a fishing village of 600 people, abandoned in 1963 when the last fishing families moved to Saint-Pierre — the church, the cemetery, the fishermen’s houses and the drying platforms for salt cod all preserved exactly as abandoned, the most poignant inhabited-place-turned-museum in the North Atlantic) and the Saint-Pierre Fish Museum covering the Grand Banks cod fishing heritage.

💡 The collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery (1992 — the Canadian government imposed a moratorium on cod fishing after stocks fell to less than 1% of their 1960s levels, directly attributable to industrial overfishing with factory trawlers from 1960–1992 — ended the economic basis of the cod-fishing communities that had populated Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon since the 16th century. The moratorium is still partially in place; cod stocks have partially recovered but have not returned to historical levels.

A final morning in Saint-Pierre (with a final café au lait at a pavement café watching the fishing boats) before the ferry back to Fortune, Newfoundland (85km, 1h15) and the return to the world of North American prices and culture — the culture shock of returning to a Tim Hortons from a French pâtisserie in the same afternoon is the most distinctive aspect of the Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon travel experience. Fly from Saint-Pierre (FSP) or ferry to Newfoundland.

💡 Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon uses French time zones, French laws, French cuisine, French education and the euro while being geographically embedded in the North American cultural sphere — 25km from Newfoundland and accessible by an 85km ferry crossing from Fortune, NL. The juxtaposition of France and Canada in the same geographic space is nowhere more vivid than at the ferry terminal, where passengers step from Newfoundland to France in 1h15.