Travel Guide Archipel De Mingan

Along the coast, less than 4 km from the coast, the Mingan Archipelago National Park Reserve of Canada boasts its thirties of limestone islands and more than a thousand islands and granitic islands for almost 100 km. Havre-Saint-Pierre faces Île du Havre, dressed with rocky cliffs at the top of which conifers. Not far from there you can see the two islands at the Hammer, the big and the small, where there are a lighthouse and some houses now abandoned. The islands of Mingan have a geological curiosity: giant monoliths or "flower pots" 5 to 10 meters tall, strangely carved by the sea, which owe their shape to a higher layer of limestone than their friable foot. At each of them, Roland Jomphe, the old poet of Havre-Saint-Pierre, gave a name according to his form. Some islands are inhabited by moose or black bears and in the seas around, many birds and cetaceans are observed. Seabirds (the parrot-beaked monarch and orange paws, the park's emblem, but also the eider, the black guillemot or the Arctic tern) are not the only ones to fish; it is also the activity of the osprey, a common rapace in the islands. The archipelago also has a remarkable diversity: ferns, orchids, mosses and lichens, some of which are only in arctic or alpine climates. Rare plants are also found as the thistle of Minganie, listed in 1924 by brother Marie-Victorin, founder of the Montreal Botanical Garden.