The best amenity at the Fogo Island Inn – a striking, X-shaped hotel on stilts – is the people of Fogo. 

Their stories, heritage and labour are tied to everything at the award-winning inn, designed by Newfoundland-born, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders to evoke a traditional outport fishing station. The hotel’s address is in the community of Joe Batt’s Arm, population 778, but the inn says its location is “on an island, off an island, at one of the four corners of the Earth.”

Community links are everywhere in the 43,000-square-foot building, from locally crafted furniture to the cheerful patchwork quilt on my bed. (The neat signature of maker Sadie Edwards was stitched in green thread on one corner.)

It’s especially evident in the character of the community hosts, who take guests on half-day excursions around their island home. They tell us their families have lived on Fogo Island for upwards of seven generations, since their ancestors arrived from Europe to fish cod in the mid-1700s. The Irish-tinged lilt in their speech makes their links to the old country clear as they take visitors on birdwatching tours or hikes, telling stories about Fogo life along the way.

Employing community hosts is part of innkeeper-founder and social entrepreneur Zita Cobb’s vision for blending tourism with Fogo-sustaining “cultural continuity.” Cobb, an eighth-generation Fogo Islander, grew up in a fishing family home without running water or electricity. When the cod industry collapsed in the late 1960s, her family had to leave. 

She migrated to Ontario, where she studied business. Her career in the high-tech industry was so successful that she retired in her 40s. In 2004, she founded Shorefast with her brothers to maximize economic development for Fogo, capitalizing on the island’s unique attributes – Cobb knew visitors would want to come there. With the Fogo Island Inn, built in 2013, Shorefast would give them a memorable place to stay.

A Day With Aubrey

I felt an instant kinship with community host Aubrey Payne, a soft-spoken 74-year-old with a gentle smile, who arrived at the inn wearing a purple button-down shirt and a Tilley hat to take us on our half-day tour. We asked to visit Tilting, a small fishing community of 250 people a few minutes’ drive down the road from the inn that’s been called “more Irish than Ireland.”

Amid brightly painted houses, white wooden fences and laundry flapping on the line, is Phil’s Shed, a workshop beside Phil and Maureen Foley’s house. It does double duty as a lively clubhouse for music, dancing and storytelling when friends, including tourists, drop by.

Inside the shed, Payne told us about the day he nearly drowned while pulling up snow crab traps in a growing storm alongside his wife Marie, who also captains a fishing boat. He fell overboard into the frigid North Atlantic and feared that, like his grandfather and uncle, he’d die in the icy water. But somehow, Marie managed to haul him out of the ocean as the trawler pitched in the waves. 

Payne led us up a rocky, mossy track called Turpin’s Trail; the fierce wind swatted our hats and coattails as we passed the oldest Irish cemetery in North America, where some of the weathered markers bear dates from the 1700s.

The historic met the fantastically modern at the sea-facing end of the trail, with the brilliant white Squish Studio. Here there are four studios, also designed by the inn’s architect, Saunders. Shorefast’s Fogo Island Arts residence program invites creatives from all over the world to use them, and art projects produced there are shown at the inn’s spacious gallery.

The Cost

The Fogo Island Inn has been called a once-in-a-lifetime stay. And with room rates starting at $2,875 for double occupancy with a three-night minimum, that’s understandable. 

The rates at the Relais & Châteaux property, recently recognized with Michelin three keys “for stays that are second to none,” includes all meals. That includes room service and a communal long-table crab and lobster “boil-up” with all the fixings, held in the spacious Saunders-designed Shed building behind the inn. Also included are most guided excursions and gear, from bikes to hiking poles. You can also sign a car out at the front desk if you want to visit places like the Fogo Clay Studio for a pottery class. I enjoyed the foraging walk and wild tea blending lesson with lead outdoor activity guide Lorie Penton. 

There’s no tipping: An economic nutrition-style label created by Cobb shows inn guests where their money goes. More than 50% is spent on wages. Profits are reinvested in the community.

Getting to Fogo Island isn’t easy. Most visitors fly to Gander International Airport. The inn has a land and ferry pick-up and return service from and to Gander, for $1,100 for up to four people. Or rent a car at the airport for the one-hour drive to the ferry; the crossing takes about 50 minutes. (If money is no object, there’s also the option of booking a six-passenger helicopter for $5,000 each way.)

The Food

A Daybreak Breakfast in a wooden box is left outside your door at 6 a.m. with a freshly baked pastry and tea or coffee. I settled into a rocking chair and watched the morning begin from my room’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

The dining room is a jewel box with windows on three sides, a soaring ceiling and chandeliers made from marine rope twisted into wildflower shapes by Dutch designer Frank Tjepkema. Lunch was interrupted one day by sightings of an exuberant breaching whale.

Executive Chef Timothy Charles starts each lunch and dinner with a cup of warming broth and a few house-made pickles. “The whole idea was that we would have a way to recentre, to open your palate up,” he said.

Charles sees the food guests eat as fuel for getting out in the community. The flavours and ingredients celebrate the place. Of course, the seafood is exceptional; I’ve never had better cod or lobster. I also loved the vegetarian lunch of brothy greens and beans.

About 80 per cent of everything used in the kitchen is local, including many foraged items. The rest is purchased from Newfoundland’s traditional trading partners, like Portugal.

Other Things to Do

Drop by the 37-seat cinema and settle into a red plush seat to watch one of several National Film Board of Canada documentaries about Fogo Island. The movie-house snack is a package of Canadian-made Hawkins Cheezies. 

Take a morning yoga class on a sheltered upper deck with instructor Jennifer Charles. Relax in the wood-burning sauna. The rooftop hot tubs overlook the ocean and are a fantastic place for a sunset soak as the light leaves Canada for the day.

A boat trip to Little Fogo Islands goes to an abandoned fishing community where you can walk amid collapsing fishing stages from the 1930s and visit the restored circa-1867 St. Anne’s Church. Watch Atlantic puffins and murres. Sometimes islanders bring their sheep over for grazing in flat-bottomed boats. 

Climb the stairs at Brimstone Head Park, to the spot members of the Flat Earth Society claim is one of the four corners of the flat Earth.

For more info: fogoislandinn.ca

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