🇨🇦 Canada · Atlantic Coast / Maritime Provinces
St. John's is one of the most singular and endearing cities in Canada: the easternmost city in North America, looking out on the Atlantic at the tip of the island of Newfoundland, and one of the oldest European-founded cities on the continent. It climbs the hills around a sheltered natural harbour, entered through a narrow gap called The Narrows, guarded from above by Signal Hill. Its houses in intense colours — the famous Jellybean Row — and its big-village feel make it unmistakable.
What makes people fall for St. John's, beyond its setting, is its culture. Isolated for centuries on its island, Newfoundland developed an identity of its own, mostly Irish and English in root, with a distinctive accent, a rich musical tradition (a lot of Celtic music) and a warm, self-mocking humour. The hospitality of its people is legendary, and George Street, a little street packed with pubs, claims one of the highest concentrations of bars per square metre in North America.
This guide covers St. John's with a practical, warm eye: how to get up Signal Hill and out to Cape Spear (the easternmost point of the continent), when to see icebergs and whales, which neighbourhoods to walk, where to hear live music and eat fish, and how to use the city as a base for the Avalon Peninsula. It is a destination for anyone after wild Atlantic nature, maritime history and one of the warmest and most peculiar local cultures in all of Canada.
The waters off Newfoundland, the Grand Banks, were one of the richest cod fishing grounds in the world, and that shaped the history of St. John's from the start. The region was the territory of Indigenous peoples, among them the Beothuk (now extinct) and, in later times, the Mi'kmaq. The Vikings reached Newfoundland around the year 1000 (at L'Anse aux Meadows), but European St. John's was born of fishing: through the 16th century, Portuguese, Spanish, French and English fishermen used its natural harbour, considered one of the oldest European-founded settlements in North America. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert formally claimed Newfoundland for the English Crown at St. John's, in what is usually cited as the start of the overseas British Empire. For centuries, the city and the island lived off cod and were the stage for the rivalry between England and France, with attacks, captures and the Battle of Signal Hill (1762), the last engagement of the Seven Years' War in North America. Signal Hill played a key role in maritime communications, and there, in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio signal in history. Newfoundland was a colony and then a British dominion with its own government, and it was only in 1949 that it joined Canada as its tenth province, the last to come in. The cod crisis and the 1992 fishing moratorium hit its traditional economy hard, and over time it shifted towards offshore oil, services and tourism. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The easternmost province and the last to join Canada: land of the Beothuk and the Inuit, of the first Viking settlement in the Americas, of the epic of the cod and of the geological peaks of Gros Morne.
Read the history of Newfoundland and Labrador →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before any city existed, the island of Newfoundland was inhabited by Indigenous peoples. The one most associated with the island is the Beothuk, a people who lived by hunting, fishing and gathering, and who used to cover their bodies and belongings with red ochre (which may, according to some theories, have given rise to the term 'red skins' applied to the peoples of the Americas). Tragically, the Beothuk died out as a people in the early 19th century, under pressure from European colonization, disease and the loss of their territories. In later times, the Mi'kmaq also settled in parts of the island.
Newfoundland also holds the oldest known European settlement in the Americas: around the year 1000, the Vikings (Norse) reached L'Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of the island, where they set up a camp. That contact was brief and had no continuity, but it confirms that Europeans set foot on Newfoundland half a millennium before Columbus.
What really drew Europeans in large numbers, though, was not conquest but fish. Off Newfoundland lie the Grand Banks, a vast underwater shelf that was one of the richest cod fishing grounds in the world. The fame of those waters, able to feed Europe with salt cod, would be the real engine of the history of St. John's.
The birth of St. John's is tied directly to cod. Through the 16th century, its excellent natural harbour — sheltered by hills and with a narrow, easily defended entrance, The Narrows — became a regular stopping point for the European fishing fleets working the Grand Banks: Portuguese, Spanish, French and, above all, English fishermen, who arrived in summer, dried and salted the cod ashore and returned to Europe. Because of how long it served as a stopping point and seasonal settlement, St. John's is considered one of the oldest European-founded settlements in North America.
A key date in its history is 1583. That year, the English navigator and adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert arrived in the harbour of St. John's and, in the name of Queen Elizabeth I of England, formally claimed Newfoundland for the English Crown. This act is usually cited as one of the founding moments of the overseas British Empire: the first English possession proclaimed on the other side of the Atlantic. Gilbert would die shortly afterwards, on the voyage home, when his ship went down.
For a long time, the English authorities saw Newfoundland more as a fishing station than as a colony to settle, and they even tried to discourage permanent settlement in order to keep the coast for the migratory fishery. Even so, a resident population slowly took root around the harbour, laying the foundations of the future city.
Like so many places in the North Atlantic, St. John's and Newfoundland were the stage for the long rivalry between England and France over control of North America and, above all, of its fisheries. The harbour changed hands and came under attack several times through the 17th and 18th centuries. To defend it, the British fortified the harbour entrance and the heights around it, especially Signal Hill, the hill commanding The Narrows, from which flags were used to signal the approach of ships (hence the name).
The most remembered military episode came in 1762, in the closing stage of the Seven Years' War. That year a French force managed to take St. John's, but the British responded and, at the Battle of Signal Hill, retook the city. This battle has a special historical value: it is considered the last engagement of the Seven Years' War on North American soil, the conflict that sealed British dominance on the continent.
Signal Hill went on playing a central role in the life of the city as a signalling and maritime communications post. Its strategic importance and its high position over the Atlantic would make it, decades later, the stage for a milestone of worldwide reach that had nothing to do with war.
On 12 December 1901, Signal Hill was the setting for one of the great milestones in the history of communications. The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of radiotelegraphy, had set up a receiving station at the top of the hill, with an aerial held up by kites to pick up signals across the Atlantic. That day, Marconi announced that he had received on Signal Hill the first transatlantic radio signal in history: three dots in Morse code (the letter 'S') sent from a powerful transmitting station at Poldhu, in Cornwall, England, more than 3,000 kilometres away.
The achievement was extraordinary and, to many, surprising: it was believed that radio waves, travelling in a straight line, could not get around the curvature of the Earth over such a distance (it would later be understood that the ionosphere reflected the waves and allowed that propagation). Marconi's reception proved that wireless communication across the oceans was possible, opening the age of global telecommunications.
It is no accident that the milestone happened in St. John's: as the easternmost inhabited point in North America, it was the place on the continent closest to Europe, ideal for throwing a radio 'bridge' across the Atlantic. Today a plaque and exhibits in Cabot Tower on Signal Hill recall that moment that changed the world.
For centuries, Newfoundland followed a historical path different from the rest of what is now Canada. It was a British colony and, by the 20th century, it had reached dominion status, with its own responsible government and St. John's as capital: in practice, an almost independent nation within the British Empire, separate from the Dominion of Canada. Its economy still depended largely on cod and a handful of resources, which left it vulnerable.
The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Newfoundland extremely hard, and it fell into a severe financial crisis and went bankrupt. Unable to sustain itself, in 1934 Newfoundland suspended its self-government and went back to being administered directly by a commission appointed from London, losing the democracy it had won. St. John's also played a significant role in the two world wars as a key Atlantic base (in the Second World War, its harbour and surroundings mattered for the Battle of the Atlantic, hence the bunkers at Cape Spear).
The big decision came after the war. In referendums held in 1948, the people of Newfoundland had to choose between regaining self-government, staying under the commission or joining Canada. By a narrow margin, union with Canada won, driven in large part by Joey Smallwood. So, on 31 March 1949, Newfoundland and Labrador became the tenth and last province to join the Canadian Confederation, with St. John's as its capital. It was the end of centuries of separate history and the start of its time as part of Canada.
For almost five centuries, life in St. John's and across Newfoundland revolved around the cod of the Grand Banks. But that apparently inexhaustible resource ran out in the end. Industrial fishing, with ever more efficient fleets and factory trawlers, overexploited the fishing grounds through the 20th century until the cod stocks collapsed. In 1992, the Canadian government declared a moratorium on the northern cod fishery, effectively banning the catch in an attempt to save the species.
The impact was devastating: overnight, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs in what was the biggest layoff in Canadian history, and whole fishing communities were left without the livelihood of centuries. It was a blow not only to the economy but to identity, for a society built on fishing. The island's rural population fell and many Newfoundlanders moved to other provinces looking for work.
St. John's, as the capital, managed to reinvent itself. The economy shifted towards offshore oil and gas on the Grand Banks (with large fields such as Hibernia), services, public administration, Memorial University, technology and, increasingly, tourism. Today the city combines its deep maritime and Irish-English heritage with a lively cultural and food scene. Its coloured houses, its music, its humour and its legendary hospitality — along with the whales, the icebergs and the Atlantic scenery — have made it one of the best loved and most singular destinations in Canada: the easternmost city on the continent, proud of its unmistakable character.