Newfoundland Circumnavigation

St. John’s, often considered North America’s oldest city, is known for its colourful houses, winding streets, steep hills, and harbour setting. Beneath Signal Hill, the Narrows connect the sheltered harbour with the open Atlantic Ocean. The city’s history is reflected in its architecture, historic sites, and long-standing maritime traditions.

St. John’s also has a growing food scene featuring Newfoundland ingredients and local dishes. Along Water Street, you can find independent shops, galleries, and cafés. In the evening, pubs and performance venues host live music, reflecting the city's strong musical traditions. As the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, St. John’s offers a starting point for learning about the region’s history, culture, and coastal communities.

Miquelon is a small French community in the North Atlantic, with a history influenced by Acadian, Basque, Breton, and Norman settlers. Fishing and farming have shaped local traditions and daily life. French remains the main language, and the village has local shops, cafés, and artisans offering locally made products.

The surrounding landscape includes rocky headlands, ponds, dunes, and coastal vegetation. Miquelon is connected to Langlade by La Dune, a 12-kilometre stretch of sand formed by ocean currents. The area has a history of shipwrecks, while nearby trails provide views of the Atlantic and opportunities to observe coastal plants and birdlife.

During your visit, browse local shops, sample French-inspired food, or stop at a village café. Miquelon offers insight into the French heritage, maritime history, and natural environment of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

At the mouth of the Conne River lies Miawpukek, whose Mi’kmaw name means “Middle River.” Long used as a seasonal gathering place, it became a permanent community around 1822 and today is the only recognized First Nation reserve on the island of Newfoundland. Its history is part of a much older pattern of movement throughout Mi’kma’ki, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Miawpukek is also a story of cultural strength and contemporary renewal. Language, traditional knowledge, education, ceremony, and community life remain closely connected, while present-day conservation initiatives carry an enduring responsibility to the surrounding lands and waters forward in new ways.

Receive a formal welcome from community leaders and spend time in Miawpukek, where history is not confined to the past but continues through living culture, modern leadership, and a relationship with place sustained across generations.

Hidden deep within a steep fjord, the outport of Francois can be reached only by boat. Colourful homes cling to the hillside in a community where the sea remains the way in and out. Explore waterfalls and lookout trails, wander through the settlement, and spend time talking with the people who continue to make their lives here.

As evening falls, we usually gather with the community for a joyful kitchen party—music, dance, laughter, and good company flowing as naturally as the tide. Raise a glass and join in the moment.

Along Newfoundland’s southern edge, the roads fall away and the sea becomes the highway. Deep fjords, sheltered coves, and towering headlands define a coast shaped by water, weather, and isolation. Its outports and resettled communities hold an important place in Newfoundland’s cultural memory, recalling generations whose lives were connected to the island primarily by sea.

The coastal barrens and bogs are alive with low-growing wildflowers, while seabirds gather along the cliffs and offshore waters. Capelin may draw whales into the bays. Bald eagles patrol the headlands, seals surface in sheltered coves, and waterfalls descend after the spring thaw.

Remote, roadless, and known intimately by the sea, the South Coast remains one of Newfoundland’s wildest and most compelling landscapes.

In Gros Morne National Park, Earth’s story is written in stone. The bronze-coloured slopes of the Tablelands expose rocks from deep within the Earth’s mantle—part of the geological evidence that helped transform our understanding of plate tectonics. Join Parks Canada naturalists for guided walks through this extraordinary landscape and learn why Gros Morne is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

After exploring the Tablelands, experience the warm spirit of Woody Point, where artists, writers, and musicians continue to draw inspiration from the surrounding mountains and sea.

In the 1500s, Red Bay was a major centre of Basque whaling, connecting this Labrador harbour with communities across the Atlantic. Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Visit the interpretation centre to see recovered artifacts, including tools and personal items from the San Juan, lost here in 1565. Then cross to Saddle Island to explore remnants of the whaling station and consider the people, ships, knowledge, and commerce that once moved through these waters as part of an early transatlantic industry.

At the northern tip of Newfoundland, within a landscape shaped by some 6,000 years of Indigenous presence, a cluster of low ridges revealed a remarkable chapter in Atlantic history.

L’Anse aux Meadows is the only authenticated Norse archaeological site in the Americas and the earliest known evidence of a European presence on the continent. Its discovery confirmed that Norse seafarers reached North America around the year 1000, a journey preserved for centuries in the Icelandic sagas.

The remains of timber-framed turf dwellings, workshops, and a forge reveal a base camp built in the tradition of settlements in Greenland and Iceland. Among the finds was a hand-forged nail, evidence of the earliest known iron production in North America. Even more intriguing are butternuts, which do not grow naturally in Newfoundland and suggest voyages farther south.

The Norse presence was brief, but its discovery transformed an ancient saga into historical fact and secured L’Anse aux Meadows a place of global significance.

Sailing Newfoundland's northeast coast brings you into communities whose histories and ways of life have long been oriented toward the sea. Depending on conditions and opportunities, visit small fishing communities where boats gather in sheltered coves and the wharf remains a natural place for conversation.

Spend time ashore, meet local people, and notice the details of coastal life—fishing stages and sheds, working boats, music, stories, and the easy wit that so often accompanies them. Harbour by harbour, another side of Newfoundland comes into view.

Return through the Narrows and beneath Signal Hill, completing a full circle around Newfoundland. St. John’s may appear much as it did at the beginning, but its colourful houses now sit within a broader palette of landscapes, stories, and communities encountered around the island.

Along the way, the sea has been more than a backdrop. It connects distant shores, sustains communities, shapes traditions, and finds its way into Newfoundland’s music and song. From lively harbours to roadless coastlines, the island’s character is grounded in the strength, wit, creativity, and warmth of its people.

Twelve days and an entire island later, the circle closes where it began, with the Narrows ahead and a whole island’s worth of stories, songs, and good company astern. As they say in Newfoundland, long may your big jib draw.