Archipiélago de Mingan

Mingan Archipelago National Park Reserve protects some 151 km² spread across a chain of more than a thousand islands and islets extending for about 150 kilometres along the northern shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, facing Anticosti Island. The protection covers only the islands, not the waters around them, although the sea governs everything: the rock, the plants, the wildlife, the climate and the visit itself, which is necessarily made by boat from Havre-Saint-Pierre or Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan.

Its distinctive feature are the monoliths: limestone towers and mushrooms rising up to some twenty metres above the shores and forming the largest concentration of this kind of erosional formation in Canada. Their story begins almost 500 million years ago, when a shallow tropical sea covered what are now the St Lawrence Lowlands and laid down on the bottom fine sediments and shells rich in calcium carbonate. After the last glaciation, the archipelago of soft limestone slowly emerged from the sea, and since then the tides, the swell, the wind and the freeze-thaw cycles have been sculpting each figure; the process is still active. Landmarks such as the Lady of Niapiskau have become symbols of the park.

The combination of limestone substrate and subarctic maritime climate produces an unusual flora, with abundant arctic-alpine plants and rare species that caught the attention of Brothers Marie-Victorin and Rolland Germain, who explored the region between 1924 and 1928 and made its scientific value known. The islands hold seabird colonies, with the Atlantic puffins of Île aux Perroquets as the main attraction, and seals and whales are regular in their waters. The park will keep its reserve status until the comprehensive land claims of the Innu are settled. A network of 42 camping areas allows overnight stays on the islands, and in 1978 the whole had already been declared a heritage site by the Government of Quebec.