Rocky Harbour

Arrowheads found in the area show that the Mi'kmaw once lived here. In the 18th and 19th centuries the harbour, then known as Small Bay or Little Harbour, was used by French fishermen working the French Shore, the stretch of coast where France kept fishing rights. Permanent settlement came slowly: Rocky Harbour first appeared in the census in 1874, with 35 people. A post office opened in 1900, and by 1921 the population had reached 357.

For most of the 20th century it remained a small community. It became a local government community in April 1966. The great change came in 1973, when the Gros Morne National Park Reserve was established around Bonne Bay. The town's population grew, and services such as a police detachment were added as Rocky Harbour became the park's main base.

The park itself was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 because its rocks show continental drift so clearly — the Tablelands south of Bonne Bay are made of rock thought to come from the Earth's mantle, forced up during a plate collision several hundred million years ago. Gros Morne became a full national park on 1 October 2005. Today Rocky Harbour sits halfway through the park on the Viking Trail, and it is a key tourist town for the park.

Rocky Harbour shares the culture of Newfoundland's outports: a close community, a dialect of English with roots in Ireland and the English West Country, and music at the heart of social life, from fiddle and accordion tunes to kitchen parties. Gift shops and craft galleries in town sell local crafts.

The park gives the area an unusually busy summer arts calendar for its size. The Gros Morne Theatre Festival, Writers at Woody Point, Gros Morne Summer Music and Trails, Tales and Tunes all take place in and around the park, bringing plays, readings and concerts to small halls in the surrounding communities.

Life is tied to the outdoors. Families fish, hunt moose, pick berries and cut wood as people in rural Newfoundland have long done, and the national park, with its trails, campgrounds and boat tours, is part of daily life as well as the reason most visitors come. The rocks of the park have a scientific fame of their own: geologists come to Gros Morne to see oceanic crust and mantle rock exposed at the surface.

About 940 people lived in Rocky Harbour at the 2021 census, a slight fall from 2016; the neighbouring communities of Norris Point and Neddie's Harbour lie close by. The town covers a land area of about 12 square kilometres. The town's only school, Gros Morne Academy, also houses the public library.

The town is a key tourist base for the national park. In summer, when accommodation fills quickly, the town's B&Bs, campground, restaurants, gift shops and boat tours serve visitors to the park, whose visitor centre stands just outside town.

Winters are long and quiet. The park stays open, with some winter activities, and the nearest airport is at Deer Lake, about 71 km away. Moose are part of everyday life: the animals, introduced to Newfoundland from the Maritimes around 1900, are found in the park at five to twenty times the density of comparable areas elsewhere in Canada, and they are a constant hazard on the roads.

Food in Rocky Harbour is the cooking of rural Newfoundland, served in a handful of restaurants in town and more across Bonne Bay in Woody Point and Trout River. Cod is the staple, most often as fish and chips, and other seafood from the surrounding waters appears on most menus in season.

Traditional island dishes are common. Fish and brewis combines salt cod with hard bread softened in water and topped with scrunchions, small pieces of fried pork fat. Toutons are fried bread dough eaten with molasses, and Jiggs dinner — salt beef boiled with cabbage, potatoes, carrot and turnip and served with pease pudding — is the Sunday meal in many homes. Moose meat, from the island's large herds, is hunted and eaten locally.

Wild berries are part of the late-summer table: bakeapples, the local name for cloudberries, and partridgeberries go into jams, pies and sauces, and figgy duff, a boiled raisin pudding, is a traditional dessert.