Prince Edward Island National Park Canada

Legendary

Established in 1937, the park protects the vulnerable northern beaches, dunes, and marshes on the island.

Photo by Andrea Schaffer

A red-haired orphan who never existed brings more than 100,000 people a year to a farmhouse on this island. Many of them come from Japan.

The farmhouse is Green Gables, and the orphan is Anne Shirley, the heroine of Anne of Green Gables. Lucy Maud Montgomery published the book in 1908, and it went on to sell more than 50 million copies.

Montgomery grew up in Cavendish, on the island's north shore. The farm belonged to her cousins, and she wandered its paths as a girl, through woods she later called the Haunted Wood and a lane she named Lover's Lane.

The village of Avonlea in her books is really Cavendish. "Green Gables was drawn from David Macneill's house," she wrote in 1911, "though not so much the house itself as the situation and scenery."

Visitors began showing up almost as soon as the book was published. In 1936, the Canadian government bought the farmhouse, and the next year it created Prince Edward Island National Park to protect both the homestead and the coast around it.

That coast is the other reason the park exists. It runs for about 60 kilometers along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with red sandstone cliffs, sand dunes, salt marshes, and wide beaches.

The red comes from iron in the rock. The same iron colors the island's famous red dirt roads.

The beaches are nesting grounds for the piping plover, a small, pale shorebird that lays its eggs right on the sand. Fewer than a few hundred pairs remain in eastern Canada, and the park closes stretches of beach each spring so the chicks can hatch undisturbed.

In 1998, the park expanded to include the Greenwich dunes, a rare U-shaped dune system on a peninsula to the east. Archaeologists have found signs that people lived there 10,000 years ago.

Tour the Green Gables farmhouse, then walk the Haunted Wood and Lover's Lane trails that start at its door. Swim or build sandcastles at Cavendish Beach, with its red cliffs at one end. Walk the floating boardwalk across Bowley Pond at Greenwich to reach the dunes, and watch for plovers along the way.