Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts

Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts sits on Lac des Sables, and long before Mont-Tremblant existed as a resort in the modern sense, this was the destination — the railway reached here in 1892, and Montreal’s wealthier families started building summer homes along the lakeshore almost immediately after, drawn by the clean air and the promise of escape from the city’s summer heat. That history is still legible in the town: grand old cottages along the water, a downtown with a settled, slightly formal feel that younger resort towns further north haven’t had time to accumulate.

We took the hour-long boat tour around the lake one August afternoon, a low-key cruise that loops past the shoreline cottages while a guide narrates who used to own which one — a mix of Quebec industrialists, at least one former prime minister’s family, and a scattering of American names from the era when Sainte-Agathe was marketed south of the border as “the Switzerland of Quebec.” The lake itself, Lac des Sables, is genuinely lovely — clear enough to see the sandy bottom near shore, ringed by forested hills that keep the wind down, making it one of the better paddling and swimming lakes in the region.

The town’s Église Sainte-Agathe, with its distinctive twin-towered facade, anchors the main street, and the Saturday market along Rue Principale in summer draws vendors from across the Laurentians — maple products, local cheese, the kind of produce stand where the person selling you tomatoes grew them themselves. In winter, the lake freezes solid enough for a marked ice-skating trail that loops for several kilometres along the shore, lit at night, which Lia declared one of the more romantic things either of us had done in Canada, and I’m inclined to agree.

Sainte-Agathe doesn’t have the polish of the newer resort villages, and that’s precisely its appeal — it feels like an actual town with an actual year-round population rather than a stage set for tourism, even as it remains, quietly, one of the loveliest lake settings in the Laurentians.

When to go: July and August for the lake, boat tours, and the Saturday market. Winter for the skating trail on Lac des Sables, usually reliable from late December through February.