Visit Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon: when to go and how to get there

The most populated island holds the services and the French atmosphere. Its streets line up brightly coloured wooden houses, around the cathedral, the Arche museum and the Heritage museum. The Pointe aux Canons lighthouse guards the harbour entrance. You sample a blended cuisine, French, Basque and Acadian, and the archipelago is still marked by the years of alcohol smuggling to the United States, from 1920 to 1933.

Ten minutes by boat from Saint-Pierre, this small island has been uninhabited since 1965. The village has been left as it was: the church, the old school turned museum, the fishermen's houses and the cemetery facing the ocean. The rusted wreck of the trawler Transpacific has lain on the rocks since 1971. A trail loops around it in two hours; a few houses can be rented for the night.

Miquelon and Langlade, long two islands, have been linked since the 18th century by a twelve-kilometre sand isthmus, formed by currents and shipwrecks. The village of Miquelon has a few hundred residents; Langlade, with no road and no electricity, is covered in boreal forest, peat bogs and waterfalls. Feral horses roam free there, and the Cap Blanc lighthouse stands over swell-battered cliffs.

At the heart of the isthmus, the Grand Barachois lagoon shelters the archipelago's largest seal colony, harbour and grey seals, watched by kayak or zodiac on a favourable tide, but never approached too closely. Offshore, humpback and fin whales pass from June to September, sometimes seen from the coast path. The archipelago is also a major stopover for North Atlantic migrating birds, and puffins nest in dense colonies on the outer islets.