Gaspé Peninsula - Québec - a journey around Canada from the Canada holiday specialists

The imposing Gaspé Peninsula, jutting out into the Atlantic, offers its inhabitants and the many visitors who flock to the area beautiful vistas of the sea and mountains. As big as Belgium, with just over 30,000 square kilometres, its population of more than 100,000 people is concentrated in waterside towns and villages, and the mountains of the interior have largely remained a wild and virgin territory that is much appreciated by outdoors enthusiasts.

The mountains at the heart of the Gaspé Peninsula are among the tallest in Quebec. Mount Jacques-Cartier, for example, reaches 1,268 m and is the highest summit in the southern part of the province. But these mountains are only a shadow of what they once were, as gradual erosion – particularly by glaciers during the most recent ice age – transformed the once towering peaks into undulating plateaus.

The Gaspé is but the northeastern tip of the Appalachians – an extensive mountain chain that begins as far away as Alabama in the United States. Hikers who walk the length of the famous International Appalachian Trail are very proud of their accomplishment once they reach the end at Cap-Gaspé. But few of them realize that they have only seen half of the Appalachians, the next section beginning on the island province of Newfoundland in the Atlantic, and continuing to the other side of the ocean, into the highlands of Scotland and Norway...