Fogo Island is a small speck of land – 25 km (16 mi) long by 14 km (8.7 mi) wide – off the coast of Newfoundland that some 2000 residents call home. It’s by no means a busy tourist destination – notoriously rainy, with no sightseeing attractions as such and accessible by ferry only; it’s so remote, in fact, it was bestowed the questionable honour of being named one of the four corners of the earth by Canada’s Flat Earth Society. 

I wasn’t too excited about visiting, to be honest, simply because we had travelled across Canada for many months by then, and I just didn’t expect to find anything on Fogo Island we hadn’t already seen.

And yet, arriving on this little island, after travelling more than 5000 km (3100 miles) from the border to Alaska to Canada’s easternmost province on the Atlantic, we did find some of the most memorable landscapes of our trip on tiny Fogo Island and loved its rough seascapes and gently rolling hills. And we neither stayed at the famous, outrageously expensive Fogo Island Inn nor did we visit between mid-May and June, when large icebergs can be seen floating around the island.

We stayed at Brimstone Head RV Park, as the campground’s only guests in late September, just when Hurricane Fiona hit Canada’s coastline and left hundreds of thousands of people without power. Fogo Island wasn’t too badly affected, fortunately, and we very much enjoyed our 3-day stay on this little island, its small world feel, remoteness and extraordinarily pretty coastal scenery with clapboard homes painted in bright colours.

You could easily drive all the roads on the island in a couple of hours and see most of what is accessible by car, some of the island’s quaint fishing villages and coastline, but following one of the many hiking trails into the backcountry or along the jagged shoreline will give you a much better feel for this tiny island. You could probably squeeze a short hike into a day trip, but allow yourself a couple of days or more in which to explore the various trails, and you’ll have a greater chance to see caribou or whales.

We did a lot of walking while on Fogo Island and want to share our favourite walks with you: the Brimstone Head and Fogo Head hikes, and the Joe Batt’s Point Trail. All are easy to medium-difficulty walks and require no previous hiking experience. Do take raingear and sturdy boots, though, as the ground is often muddy.