Baie-Saint-Paul

The bay appears on a map by Pierre Desceliers around 1550 as Baie de l'Ilet, and Samuel de Champlain called it Baie du Gouffre in 1632 after a whirlpool at the mouth of the river; by 1641 the name Baie Saint-Paul was in use. The first settlers arrived around 1650, making the valley one of the first parts of New France to be colonised. The land was divided between two seigneuries on either side of the Gouffre, granted in 1636 and 1682, and the parish of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul was founded in 1681.

In the 1770s the town gained some prominence when Doctor Philippe-Louis-François Badelard named a disease he was researching the Baie-Saint-Paul malady. A visitor in the early 1800s noted mineral springs in the area. Local government changed shape many times: the village separated from the parish in 1893, gained city status in 1913, lost it in 1922 and regained it in 1961, and in 1996 the city, the parish and Rivière-du-Gouffre were merged into today's Baie-Saint-Paul.

The landscape the settlers farmed was formed long before: the Charlevoix hills are the eroded remains of a huge meteorite impact, part of which lies beneath the St Lawrence. The painters Clarence Gagnon and René Richard are among the town's notable people, and in 1984 the first show under the name Cirque du Soleil was held at the town's fair, La Fête foraine de Baie-Saint-Paul.

Baie-Saint-Paul is known above all for its art galleries, which line Rue Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and the painters Clarence Gagnon and René Richard are numbered among its notable people. The contemporary art museum, in a building opened in 1992 on the site of an old cinema, runs the International Symposium of Contemporary Art every year, which brings artists from around the world together with the public; its collection, largely built from the symposium, holds works by more than 500 artists.

Cirque du Soleil was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul on 16 June 1984 by Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix, former street performers who had toured Quebec as Les Échassiers, the stilt walkers. The circus is now headquartered in Montreal, but the town keeps the connection alive: Le Festif!, held on the last weekend of July, mixes popular music with circus arts in its streets.

The town is almost entirely French-speaking, with about 97 per cent of residents speaking French as their first language. Charlevoix's regional identity is strong, built on its hills, its farms and its artists, and the Charlevoix World Biosphere Reserve was recognised by UNESCO in 1988.

Baie-Saint-Paul had 7,371 residents at the 2021 census, up about 3 per cent on 2016, spread over a large municipality that takes in the town, the Gouffre valley and hamlets such as Saint-Placide and La Mare. It is the seat of the Charlevoix Regional County Municipality and the region's cultural, economic and administrative centre.

Tourism, the arts and food production underpin the economy. Galleries, restaurants, auberges and outdoor outfitters serve visitors, while farms, cheese makers, orchards and cider makers in and around the valley sell their own produce. The Route des Saveurs links producers of cheese, cider, craft beer, chocolate, duck and organic meat along the Charlevoix roads.

Most residents live in the town centre and in houses along the valley roads. Daily life follows the seasons: busy summers of festivals and visitors, ski weekends at Le Massif in winter, and quieter spring and late-autumn months when many visitor businesses slow down.

Charlevoix is one of Quebec's best-known regions for local produce, and Baie-Saint-Paul is its shop window. Cheese leads: the Laiterie Charlevoix, a cheese économusée, sells Charlevoix cheeses alongside cheeses from other regions, and the Migneron family produce artisan cheeses as well as wines and spirits. Orchards supply cider, including the cidre de glace, ice cider made from frozen apples, that Quebec invented, sold in a cider maker's shop on the main street.

Along the Route des Saveurs, farms and small producers sell duck, organic meat, market vegetables, chocolate and craft beer, and the town's restaurants build menus around them. The older Quebec home cooking is still everywhere: tourtière, the meat pie, pea soup, fèves au lard, beans slow-cooked with bacon and maple syrup, and desserts such as tarte au sucre, sugar pie, and pouding chômeur, a white cake in a maple-syrup pudding.

Rue Saint-Jean-Baptiste holds most of the cafés, bakeries and bistros, and in late autumn the Christmas market brings crafts and local foods into the town centre.