My first encounter with the Gasper Peninsula was a mouthful of flowers. When I visited five years ago, someone gave me a spoon of petals. When I tell Quebecers about this, they are surprised. That’s partly because Canada’s fertile eastern region stretches to the Gulf of St. Lawrence as if it wanted to go to Newfoundland, where many people in Quebec spent their childhood holidays without much interference from international visitors like me. Another reason is that although cactus is known as a food, it is not a flower. It’s a fish.
Upon our return last September, my husband, Craig, and I embarked on a journey around the peninsula. To our delight, we discovered that the Gasper Peninsula is a veritable treasure trove of natural resources, a beacon of abundance in our era of diminishing resources. The peninsula boasts 22 salmon rivers, their crystal-clear waters meandering through lush forests. From quaint island huts to chic waterfront eateries, the aroma of fresh seafood permeates the air. But these fish are more than just a meal. They are a living testament to the rich history of the peninsula, a history written in fins and scales.
This was the ancestral territory of the Indigenous people, the Mi ‘know, who probably migrated east along the St. Lawrence River, past Montreal and Quebec City, and then stayed because the food was abundant there. Around 1000 AD, Vikings began fishing for cod, which they dried, salted, and shipped across the Atlantic. In 1534, Jacques Cartier arrived, planted a huge cross in what is now the town of Gaspevel, and claimed the whole country for France. The peninsula’s French name, gaspsie, comes from the Mi ‘kmaq Gespeg, meaning “end of the land.” However, given that the Atlantic is the medieval equivalent of the highway connecting North America and Europe, “the beginning of the land” might be just as appropriate.
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We planned a week-long trip from Quebec City and a 565-mile northeast detour along the St. Lawrence River. We would stop at the farthest point for a brief swim in the Bay of St. Lawrence, then return via the Bay of Charleur. The water was always on our left, sometimes so close that it seemed we could leave.
We set off from Cape Bolton, a reminder that the wild waters are far more than just a beautiful backdrop. We climbed the first of the slender, elegant red-and-white beacons that warned ships away from the banks of the St. Lawrence River and visited the museum next door, a building shaped like a sinking ship commemorating the event in which the warning was invalidated. In 1914, nine-year-old Dolly Brooks drowned when the ocean liner Empress of Ireland sank en route from Quebec to Liverpool. More than two-thirds of the 1,477 passengers were missing.
We continued along the river toward Reford Gardens, a botanical haven near the village of Grimsatisse, about 200 miles northeast of Quebec City. Five years ago, I got that spoon full of begonias, pansies, carnations, and marigolds, the prelude to a hearty, home-grown four-course lunch. This remarkable place, with plates dotted with flowers and leaves, made me curious about the rest of the peninsula.
To our right, the landscape changed, with forests and villages coming and going; On the left, the other side of the great river receded and eventually disappeared. The scenery is so breathtaking that I can’t fathom how the Quebecers managed to keep the Gaspargal peninsula to themselves for so long. The answer may be under our wheels. The road was built in 1929. Before that, you must be determined to venture this far.
Elsie Radford certainly is. After the surgery, her doctor suggested that she replace her fishing hobby with gardening. He didn’t anticipate that his patient would create the stunning expanse of space that bears her name, with rhododendron trails, botanical gardens, ferns, and various pink flowers. Reford wasn’t a professional gardener, just a stubborn Ontario native with much money. However, she had somehow turned a spruce forest into a happy clearing since 1926, before the road arrived – in a part of the world where it often didn’t snow until May. In the warm days of early autumn, it’s easy to forget how cold winter can be in Quebec. Cartier nearly died of what we now know as scorbutic, thanks to a son of the St. Lawrence Iroquois Chief Donacona, who gave him a tea made from the bark of “Aneda” (probably white cedar).
On this trip, as was the case five years ago, there often seemed to be petals on my plate – perhaps not surprising, given that there is so much variety of plants on a peninsula with four national parks that it was a favorite destination of the great botanist Frittri Mary Victoria. We spent the first night at a hotel in Gasparsi National Park, where I saw a photo taken during his stay in the area. As a wall decoration, however, it’s overshadowed by the giant moose head stuffed animal in the dining room. The peninsula’s fauna is also stunning, with black bears, bobcats, beavers, ermine, and more than 150 bird species. The park has one of the highest concentrations of moose in Quebec and the only reindeer population south of the St. Lawrence River. That night, though, I wasn’t observing herbivores but mimicking their eating habits. At the end of dinner, I had sugar pie and ice cream made with sweet white clover, a plant that grows nearby and tastes like vanilla.
But they treated me more often than they treated me with flowers. In a cafe on the riverbank near the Furirong National Park, we spent our second and third nights at the Oasis, a campsite made up of five small teardrop-like buildings almost on the beach. The sandwich appears to contain a school of shrimp at La Poissonnerie du Pecheur, a roadside fishmonger and cafe in Chaleur Bay with a forested view of New Brunswick. Even the restaurant Resto des Margaulx serves excellent lobster sandwiches, and this humble chalet is the only good food in town on Bonaventure Island, which has been uninhabited since 1971.
Bonaventure was not our first adventure outside the mainland. Our stay in Furillon included a whale-watching boat tour, with a close-up of a 40-plus-foot-long humpback whale and two smaller minke whales playing next to it like a sideshow. We also went on a guided kayaking tour, during which we found ourselves at eye level with more than a dozen seals, their large, dark eyes and glossy back fur making them as cute as puppies. Then we came to Gaspier, the midpoint of our journey, mainly known for its beautiful location, sheltered in a beautiful bay, a delightful 15-minute stroll along the waterside boardwalk from the square that calls itself the birthplace of Canada.
We spent nights four and five at the Hôtel La Normandie in Percé, an exceptionally pretty town on the farthest point of the peninsula. Percé is named for a vast hunk of pierced limestone just offshore, a natural wonder that is estimated to weigh 5 million tons and looks, from one angle, like a gigantic horse drinking from the sea. It was nearly as memorable a sight as the mountain of shellfish at La Maison du Pêcheur, a waterfront restaurant that also featured flowers in a place that could be seen as even more unlikely than Elsie Reford’s gardens: my cocktail. “It’s sea buckthorn berry,” Craig told me, checking his translation app for the enliveningly sour apricot-colored berries sprouting from a concoction that included local gin, absinthe, and spruce beer. The bartender, like almost everyone I met, was bilingual, but the word for argousier had defeated her.
The huge holed rock loomed at close quarters as we passed by on our hour-long boat ride to Bonaventure. We took a peaceful hike across the island, wind sighing through the long grass, water bumping against the base of the cliff, disturbed only by what sounded like a loudly crying baby. Peering down to the water, we discovered more seals, sunning themselves on the rocks and howling amicably to one another. Noisy or silent, these creatures, like the herons, cormorants, and bald eagles, had chosen this place for a reason. We were all, it seems, there for the fish.
It was also one of the strangest wild animals, the Northern gannet, a white bird with a long beak and fearsome blue eyes. On the eastern side of Bonaventure Island, home to one of the largest bird colonies in the world, our hike ended on a high cliff, each inhabited by thousands of snowflake birds dotted with dark rocky soil. I ignored the wooden viewing tower and stood farther away from the smell of bird droppings as they swooped down to feed their furry gray pups.
We take another route back to the pier, through the woods, stopping for a delicious lobster sandwich and craft beer. Quebecers are avid, talented brewers, and we can intersperse our tour with local draft breaks. After the boat took us back to Perth, we spent a pleasant evening at Pit Caribou, listening to live music and sipping limited-edition cuv Edras brewed with Riesling wort. Several times along the way, we couldn’t resist stopping and poking our heads around the door of an interesting little brewery. But it wasn’t until we got to the last beer shop, Tete d ‘Allumette, in st.-andr -de-Kamouraska, a trendy gathering place with salty snacks and a view of vats, that I realized, In a sense, these beers are also a mouthful of flowers. That’s because I was drinking lily with added petals.
I was still weighing the relative importance of flowers and fish, land and water, when we arrived at the Pasheimbiak National Historic Site, on the edge of Barachois, a lagoon formed by sandbars where large quantities of cod were once dried, salted, and exported. In the 19th century, “you could buy a hat with a dozen cod,” recalls our guide, Lorraine Paris, whose family has worked here for generations, “or fifteen shoes.” Fish is not just a food; it’s even an income: “It’s our money.”
To get to these places, scattered with 19th-century warehouses, we rounded the peninsula to its southern side, crossed a causeway, and came to a small piece of land in Chaleur Bay. In early July 1534, Cartier sailed into the Bay of Charest. He named it Chaleur, after the French word for warmth, because he found it “milder than Spain.” The weather was nice and fresh for hiking and biking through the many forests and parks, but we needed more cold to spoil our boat ride. The sun shines on the groves of maple, birch, and balsam fir trees that dot the white clapboard houses, dancing on the water and glinting off slender metal church spires, illuminating the jagged cliff edges and lighthouses along the way.
Wandering around Paspsambiac, now an open-air museum, it became clear that this peninsula side was warmer than the northern region along the St. Lawrence River. Although the wind is beneficial for drying freshly caught fish, it travels between the old buildings, which display souvenirs, photographs, shipbuilding exhibits, and, in one place, a forge with a blacksmith inside. It tugged at our clothes in the clearing where the cod racks once stood. And – milder than Spain?
We continued west along the peninsula’s south shore towards Carton-on-Sea, where the waters of Charest Bay were so bright that the sky seemed dull. In some places, the water was so close to the road that it seemed the two modes of transport were greeting each other. At La Mie vsamriitable, a bakery, and deli in Carleton, the cheerful waiter is a French Marseille who is stoically learning how to cope with winter after falling in love with a Quebecer. He told us that the house across the street belonged to a fisherman. So we knocked on the door, and he sold us fresh oysters and a paring knife.
We took our bounty through the dense forest and up Mount St. Joseph to Mount Geodomes de Jardins, where one of the five large, round huts was where we spent the night. We arrived just in time for the sun to cast a fuchsia glow over the treetops and the sea beyond, and we shucked oysters and grilled fresh Quebec sweet corn on the cob. All the domes were separated by trees, so we felt happily isolated: like creatures in the forest, but with shelter, electricity, and a gas barbecue on deck. The curving interior is large enough to accommodate a kitchen, a mezzanine bed and, most importantly, two hammocks. The scenery was stunning, and the oysters, a true work of art.
French control of Quebec ended in 1760 with the Battle of Restigouche at Chaille Bay. Since the British victory prevented the French army from resupplying, the fish again played a role in winning Canada, this time for the British. The battle was named after the Restigouche River, which flows northeast from the Appalachian Mountains to form the border between Quebec and New Brunswick before emptying into Chalrer’s Bay. Today, the former battlefield is a historical relic. In nearby Meguassa National Park, we took a scenic two-mile hiking trail along the water’s edge. Its name, “Evolution of Life,” refers not to a power struggle between modern Europeans but to a cliff full of exceptionally well-preserved fossils from the Devonian period (known as the Age of Fish), which earned it a UNESCO World Heritage listing.
After the hike, we stroll through the fascinating permanent exhibit, which displays the backdrop of rare specimens, beautiful as sculptures, many of which were dug out of the cliffs when unprotected. Anyone could come and pick up a priceless 350-million-year-old souvenir. Among the exhibits is a spiny fish that has been extinct for 250 million years and is named “Prince of Meguasha.” The pioneer of this terrestrial vertebrate thrilled Swedish scientist Erik Jarvik, who devoted his entire career – 60 years!
Then, it was time to leave the Bay of Charest, cross the neck of the peninsula, and return to its northern edge. St. Lawrence felt like an old friend as I sipped my gin and tonic and looked out from the glass-walled bar deck. The bar is part of the St-Laurent Distillery, which opened in 2022. When the bartender tells me about the smugglers who smuggled alcohol here during Prohibition, water mist hovers over the water like a scene from a ghost story: it’s a new perspective, though the journey from illegal carrion to premium (legal) gin, distilled from riverside plants – and more flowers! Thisainly progress.
As the fog lifted, the familiar sight of the Horn Lighthouse, a red-and-white pillar, greeted us. We had come full circle. Cartier, the explorer, had once hoped that the fish in these waters would bring him wealth, and he had needed the flowers, or at least the bark, to save his life. Our journey, in contrast, was a simple and joyful one. We were here to savor the local cuisine, breathe the salty air, and immerse ourselves in the unique beauty of this eastern wilderness steeped in early Canadian history.
