Anticosti
We use the number of languages Wikipedia covers a site in as a rough measure of how well known it is. Counts of people who have stood there or want to go will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here live in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Anticosti, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, is the largest island in Quebec. Its rocks form a continuous sedimentary sequence more than 2,000 m thick, the most complete Ordovician and Silurian strata in eastern North America. In them lies a fossil record of the first mass extinction of animal life, 447 to 437 million years ago, covering 10 million years. On thousands of broad bedding surfaces, shelled and sometimes soft-bodied animals that lived on the floor of a shallow tropical sea can be seen.
In 1534 the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed along its coast. In 1680 Louis XIV granted Louis Jolliet the seigneury of the Mingan Archipelago and Anticosti as a reward for his explorations of the Mississippi and Hudson Bay, and Jolliet settled on the island with his family the following year. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763 the island became part of British North America.
In 1895 the French chocolate maker Henri Menier bought Anticosti for $125,000, built the village of Port-Menier and released 220 white-tailed deer for hunting; their descendants now number more than 160,000. The government of Quebec bought the island in 1974. On 19 September 2023 the island's entire coastline, except the area around Port-Menier, and the banks of the Jupiter and Vauréal rivers were inscribed.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s licence. This is an early version and may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).