Saguenay Fjord
Interesting facts
- The statue of Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay on Cap Trinité, carved by Louis Jobin in 1881, is made of white pine sheathed in lead and stands about 9 metres tall.
- According to the story behind it, the statue was a vow by salesman Charles-Napoléon Robitaille, who survived falling through the river ice after praying to the Virgin.
- Too heavy to lift whole, the statue was cut into fourteen pieces and hoisted up the cliff to its ledge in an operation that took eight days.
- In 2008 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a 25-cent coin bearing the image of the Cap Trinité statue.
- The tide is felt far inland: tidal waters push up the fjord for roughly 100 km, as far as the city district of Chicoutimi.
- The fjord reaches its greatest depth at about 270 metres.
- The ancient rift valley that guided the glaciers, the Saguenay Graben, is about 250 km long and 50 km wide.
- The river takes its name from the legendary Kingdom of Saguenay, a fabled realm of riches in the accounts of early French explorers.
- Cap Trinité is a wall of hard granitic gneiss whose highest point reaches about 411 metres; its rock face was first climbed in 1967.
- After the catastrophic Saguenay flood of July 1996, a layer of fresh sediment 10 to 50 cm thick sealed off polluted mud on the river bottom.
Why it is worth it
For about 105 km before it meets the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay River flows through a true fjord — a trench gouged by ice, two to four kilometres wide, walled by cliffs that average 150 metres and in places rise to 350, and filled with water averaging 210 metres deep. It is one of the most southerly fjords in the Northern Hemisphere, and the sheer scale of its rock walls is what gives it its force.
Its history is written in the rock. The basement here dates back to the Grenville mountain-building of the Precambrian, and around 200 million years ago a long block of crust sank between two faults to form the Saguenay Graben. During the last glacial period an ice sheet two to three kilometres thick pushed through this weakness and deepened it; when the ice melted about 10,000 years ago, the sea flooded in, and the land has been slowly rising ever since. Today the fjord is layered: fresh water from Lac Saint-Jean flows out on top, while cold salt water from the St. Lawrence, making up about 93 percent of the volume, lies beneath. That deep marine layer harbours isolated populations of Greenland halibut and Arctic cod, and Greenland sharks frequent the depths; belugas breed in the cold waters at its mouth, and blue, fin and minke whales are also found in the park's waters.
Innu and other First Nations used the fjord for thousands of years before Jacques Cartier came in 1535, and by the end of the 16th century Tadoussac, at the mouth, had become a summer meeting place where First Nations traded furs with European ships. Midway along the fjord rises Cap Trinité, a cliff stepped in three great tiers above Baie Éternité, with a statue of Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay set on its ledges. Much of the shore has been protected since 1983 in the Saguenay Fjord National Park, which adjoins the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park.
Getting there
The village of Tadoussac lies at the mouth of the fjord on the St. Lawrence. The town of Rivière-du-Loup is about 37 km away in a straight line, but on the opposite, south shore of the St. Lawrence. The city of Saguenay lies at the head of the fjord, and the nearest airport is Saguenay-Bagotville Airport (YBG), about 97 km away.
On these lists
48.13167, -69.72667per Wikidata