Val-David

Val-David has been attracting painters, potters, and eccentrics since the 1920s, when a colony of artists and free thinkers started settling into the village looking for cheap land and dramatic scenery, and the character has never really left. Walking Val-David’s main strip today, you pass more ceramics studios and independent galleries per block than anywhere else in the Laurentians, and the whole place has an unhurried, slightly scruffy charm that feels genuinely earned rather than curated for tourists — though tourists have, inevitably, arrived in numbers over the decades since.

The 1000 Pots exhibition happens here every July — a three-week outdoor ceramics show that fills the village with pottery from across Quebec and beyond, tables and tables of glazed stoneware laid out under tents, and Lia spent close to two hours going through it with the focus of someone who’d forgotten I existed. We left with a set of mugs I still use every morning in Mexico, each one slightly different, thrown by a potter whose name I’ve since forgotten and whose work I think about constantly.

Val-David’s other identity is as a rock climbing hub — the cliffs around the village, particularly at Parc régional Dufresne, have some of the best sport and traditional climbing in eastern Canada, developed since the 1960s, and on a warm Saturday the cliff base has the feel of a small climbing festival even when nothing official is happening. I don’t climb, but I hiked the trail below the cliffs one afternoon and watched a dozen or so climbers working routes above the river, calls and belay chatter echoing off the rock in a way that made the whole gorge feel alive.

The Le P’tit Train du Nord rail trail runs directly through the village, which means you can arrive by bike from Saint-Jérôme or points further south, and a good number of visitors do exactly that, stopping in Val-David for the night before continuing north toward Mont-Tremblant. It’s a village built for slow arrivals — by bike, by foot, or by simply deciding to stay an extra day.

When to go: Mid-July for the 1000 Pots exhibition, the single best reason to time a visit. May through October for climbing and hiking. Fall colour along the river gorge in late September rivals anywhere else in the region.