Mingan Archipelago
Interesting facts
- Archaeological digs by Parks Canada in 1986 uncovered a stone oven where Basque whalers rendered blubber in the 17th and 18th centuries.
- Basque, Spanish and Portuguese seafarers fished cod and hunted whales around the islands from the 16th century onward.
- Human presence on the archipelago goes back at least 2,000 years, when First Nations came for shellfish, salmon and seals.
- Besides the Mingan thistle, a rare variety of the sparrow's-egg lady's-slipper orchid carries the archipelago's name.
- Alongside some 350 vascular plants, botanists have counted around 150 mosses and liverworts and 152 lichens on the islands.
- The reserve shelters the largest concentrations of Arctic terns, common terns and common eiders anywhere along the St. Lawrence.
- Nearly 200 bird species have been recorded here, and grey, harbour and harp seals all frequent the surrounding waters.
- Minke, humpback and fin whales, white-beaked dolphins and harbour porpoises hunt the plankton-rich cold waters around the islands.
- The islands' rocks belong to two Ordovician formations: dolomite of the Romaine Formation below, fossil-rich limestone of the Mingan Formation above.
- The botanists Brother Marie-Victorin and Brother Rolland-Germain explored the islands repeatedly between 1924 and 1928.
Why it is worth it
Along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, off the coast of Quebec's Côte-Nord, the sea and the frost have carved low limestone islands into a gallery of stone figures. The Mingan Archipelago is best known for its erosion monoliths – free-standing pillars, arches and "flowerpot" stacks, some capped with a tuft of vegetation, that rise from pebble beaches and rocky shelves at the edge of the water. Nowhere else in Canada are such sea-sculpted pillars found in comparable numbers, and their odd, sculptural silhouettes have become the emblem of the region.
The rocks are Ordovician limestones and dolomites, laid down on the floor of an ancient shallow sea more than 440 million years ago and locally rich in fossils. Once the beds were exposed, waves, rain and frost began working on them, undercutting and dissolving the weaker layers and leaving the more resistant blocks standing alone as pillars. Some forty limestone islands and around a thousand islets and reefs are scattered over roughly 150 km of coastline between Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan and Aguanish, with Anticosti Island lying across the channel to the south. Île Niapiskau, with its tall limestone monoliths, is among the best known.
The cold Labrador waters give the islands a subarctic character. Their thin limy soils support some 350 vascular plants, including arctic-alpine species far south of their usual range and rare local forms such as the Mingan thistle, whose study began with the botanist Brother Marie-Victorin's expeditions here in the 1920s. Atlantic puffins, razorbills, common eiders and terns nest on the islands, and seals and whales feed in the surrounding sea. After Route 138 reached this coast in 1976 and opened the area up, the islands were protected in 1984 as the Mingan Archipelago National Park Reserve, its status as a reserve pending the settlement of Innu land claims.
Getting there
Most of the islands lie within the municipality of Havre-Saint-Pierre, the main base for the archipelago, with the western islands belonging to Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan. The islands are reached by boat from these communities. The nearest larger city is Sept-Îles, about 199 km away, and the nearest airport is Havre-Saint-Pierre Airport (YGV), about 8 km away. Route 138 runs along the mainland coast.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Mingan Archipelago is an archipelago located east of Quebec, Canada. It consists of a chain of about 40 islands.
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