Natashquan
"Natashquan is where the road runs out. After this, the coast belongs to boats, planes, and winter ice roads."
The village where paved Route 138 simply stops — birthplace of Gilles Vigneault and gateway to the roadless Lower North Shore.
Route 138 ends at Natashquan, and I mean that literally — the pavement simply stops at the edge of the village, and beyond it the Basse-Côte-Nord, the Lower North Shore, continues for hundreds more kilometres of coastline reachable only by the Bella Desgagnés ferry, by small plane, or in winter by an ice road that forms along the frozen shore. Driving the last stretch into Natashquan, watching the highway markers count down to a number that would simply cease to matter, gave the arrival a finality I hadn’t expected from what is, on paper, just another small fishing village.
Natashquan’s most photographed feature is a row of weathered wooden fishing sheds known locally as “les galets” — grey, salt-bleached, huddled together on a spit of rock above the beach, unpainted for so long that the wood has taken on the color of the stones beneath them. They’ve become an unofficial symbol of the whole Côte-Nord, printed on postcards sold in towns hundreds of kilometres away that most of those postcard-buyers will never actually reach. Standing among them in a wind coming straight off the Gulf, I understood the appeal — there’s a stark, unornamented beauty to buildings that have simply endured rather than been maintained.
The village is also the birthplace of Gilles Vigneault, one of Quebec’s most beloved poets and songwriters, whose song “Mon pays” (“My country, it’s not a country, it’s winter”) is close to an unofficial second anthem in the province. A small museum and several markers around the village trace his life and the fishing and Innu heritage that shaped his work. Adjacent to Natashquan is the Innu community of Nutashkuan, and the cultural overlap between the two — one francophone, one Innu, sharing a name and a stretch of coast — reflects the layered history of the entire Lower North Shore.
When to go: July and August, when the weather is most forgiving and the Bella Desgagnés ferry runs its full schedule for anyone continuing on to the Lower North Shore. The drive from Havre-Saint-Pierre takes half a day through increasingly sparse terrain — fuel up before you leave.