St John's, Newfoundland

St. John's, Newfoundland is the oldest English-founded city in North America, and it has the personality to prove it. Clinging to the steep slopes above a harbour so narrow that arriving ships seem to thread a needle between the clifftops, this city of 110,000 is the colourful, wind-battered, defiantly individual capital of Canada's youngest province — a place where the houses are painted in Jellybean Row hues of turquoise, saffron, and coral, where the pubs on George Street constitute the densest concentration of bars per square metre in North America, and where the transatlantic connection to Ireland is so strong that the local accent bewilders mainland Canadians and delights visiting Dubliners.

Signal Hill, the dramatic headland guarding the harbour entrance, is the city's most iconic landmark and a site of genuine historical significance. It was here, in December 1901, that Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless signal — three faint clicks of Morse code transmitted from Poldhu in Cornwall, 3,400 kilometres away — a moment that inaugurated the age of wireless communication. Cabot Tower, built in 1897 to commemorate both the 400th anniversary of John Cabot's landfall and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, stands at the summit, its stone walls buffeted by the Atlantic winds that whip across the headland with a force that makes standing upright an athletic achievement. The panoramic view from the tower — the harbour entrance below, the open Atlantic stretching to Europe, and the icebergs that drift south on the Labrador Current in spring — is one of the most evocative in Eastern Canada.

The food culture of St. John's has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years, as a new generation of chefs has embraced the extraordinary wild ingredients of Newfoundland's boreal coast. Traditional dishes — fish and brewis (salt cod and hardtack), jiggs dinner (a boiled meat and vegetable feast served on Sundays), and toutons (fried dough served with molasses) — remain beloved, but they now coexist with restaurants serving foraged chanterelles, partridgeberries, and sea buckthorn alongside cod tongues, moose, and the cold-water shrimp hauled from the Labrador Sea. The Newfoundland screech-in — a mock ceremony in which visitors kiss a cod, take a shot of screech rum, and recite a pledge of allegiance to Newfoundland — remains the province's most entertaining welcoming ritual.

Cape Spear, 12 kilometres southeast of the city, is the easternmost point in North America — a windswept headland where the sunrise reaches the continent before anywhere else and the ruined Second World War gun emplacements stand as reminders of the Battle of the Atlantic, when German U-boats prowled these waters and Newfoundland served as the frontline of transatlantic defence. The East Coast Trail, a 336-kilometre hiking network along the Avalon Peninsula coast, passes through Cape Spear on its way north and south through some of the most dramatic coastal scenery in Canada — sea stacks, wave-carved arches, and headlands where humpback whales breach offshore and puffin colonies nest in the cliff-face burrows.

St. John's is served by Azamara and Holland America Line on Canada and New England itineraries, with ships docking at the harbour cruise terminal below Signal Hill. The prime visiting season runs from June through September, with July and August offering the warmest weather and the peak iceberg season — massive bergs calved from Greenland glaciers drift past the harbour mouth, their blue-white bulk visible from Signal Hill in one of the most extraordinary juxtapositions of urban and natural scenery in the world.