Isle-aux-Coudres

The free ferry from Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive takes about fifteen minutes to cross to Isle-aux-Coudres, and in that short span the mainland’s Charlevoix hills give way to something flatter, smaller, and older-feeling — a 25-square-kilometre island that Jacques Cartier named for its hazel trees in 1535 and that has been quietly farmed and fished ever since. We rented bikes at the small dock-side outfitter, which is genuinely the right way to see the island; a single road loops its full circumference in about twenty-five kilometres, flat enough for anyone, past farmhouses, chapels, and a coastline that alternates between rocky point and long tidal flat.

The island’s two stone windmills, Les Moulins de l’Isle-aux-Coudres, sit side by side near the village of La Baleine — a water mill and a wind mill built in the 1800s to grind the island’s buckwheat and wheat into flour, restored and still operating seasonally, with millers who explain the mechanism in a French thick enough with island accent that Lia, fluent as she is, had to ask them to repeat themselves twice. The flour they grind supplies a small on-site bakery, and the bread that comes out of it — dense, slightly sweet, genuinely different from anything sold on the mainland — was worth the detour on its own. We ate a whole loaf standing in the parking lot, which felt undignified and was completely worth it.

The island has a long relationship with the river beyond farming, too: its position in a narrows of the St. Lawrence made it a centre for eel fishing and, historically, for the goélettes — small wooden cargo schooners that once carried goods up and down the river before roads made them obsolete. A maritime museum near the ferry dock, the Musée des Voitures et Jouets Anciens along with the separate Économusée de la Voile, gets into that history in more depth than the island’s small size would suggest it deserves.

When to go: June through September, when the windmills operate and the bakery is running full seasonal hours. A full day is enough to bike the loop and see everything unhurried; the ferry runs frequently and there’s no need to book ahead.