Unique Experiences at Fogo Island Inn

For Fogo Islanders, hospitality is innate. As a guest of Fogo Island Inn, you experience that hospitality first-hand. Every guest is paired with a community member through our Community Host program; your host guides you on a personalized Island Orientation, where the history of Fogo Island comes alive in shared stories and memories of this place. Learn about Fogo Island’s eleven communities and decide where you’ll stop to immerse yourself in Tilting’s Irish heritage, or Fogo’s mercantile past. You’ll return to the Inn with a deeper understanding of the stories woven into the building.

Where this journey begins is also crucial to better understanding Fogo Island and its people. Every Island Orientation starts at the Punt Premises, a restored traditional fishing premises where Fogo Island’s fishing history is expressed through objects: boatbuilding tools, a wooden boat, an old stage, cod traps. You start here, with a warming cup of tea or coffee, hearing stories of the past, before meandering through the island’s present.

Many other activities included in your stay at Fogo Island Inn invite community immersion. Our Guest Experience team are happy to connect you with community members who will welcome you in their homes. During our Jam and Jelly Making experience, Joan Penney shares her table and her stories through an age-old practice on Fogo Island. Watch her transform the island’s favourite berries — bakeapples, blueberries, partridgeberries — into a delicious treat for you to take home.

Over in Tilting, passionate grower Norm Foley also uses some of these berries in the Traditional Boil-Up he cooks up in his traditional saltbox home. Savour his homemade dishes, from toutons to fish cakes, and learn how each one teaches about this place and its people. The more adventurous can stick to the traditional definition of a “boil-up”, which, in Newfoundland, refers to an outdoor meal on an open fire, with our Outdoor Adventure team.

While some of our best stories start in the kitchen, others are best shaped by a song. Through Music & Storytelling, learn the melodies strummed and sung through generations. Step into a shed, places for gathering and celebrations on the island, and listen to traditional music. You might even be handed an instrument and asked to join in through a song and dance for a real Fogo Island shed party at Foley’s Shed in Tilting or Art’s Landing in Joe batt’s Arm.

Fogo Islanders have always known how to make things. What started as a need — a need for a wooden boat to fish, or a warm quilt to survive wind-swept winters, or a chair and a table built from what remains — has now grown into an expression of what makes Fogo Island so unique.

Fogo Island Inn embodies this, blending the traditional with the contemporary. Ask for an INNsider Tour to understand how Fogo Island’s history of making and its culture of crafts inspired our architecture and design. You’ll see hand-made hooked rugs depicting scenes and symbols from everyday life — each one made by women on the island. Learn more about rug hooking at the Winds & Wave Artisans’ Guild in Tilting, or try your hand at the craft at a weekly Makers’ Night, open to all guests, visitors, and community members.

The traditional follows you to your room, where a name stitched at the corner of your quilt signals who made it. Most of the furnishings and textiles making you feel at home were made right here, by the skilled makers at Fogo Island Workshops. Through collaborations with international designers, Fogo Island Workshops brings the making of Fogo Island to a global audience.

This relationship between the local and the global is celebrated in the Fogo Island Gallery, where Fogo Island Arts presents an exhibition every year. Fogo Island Arts is an international residency program and Shorefast’s founding program. Every year, its residencies invite artists, curators, and writers to think, create, and connect on Fogo Island. They do so from one of the four artist studios designed by Todd Saunders — walk to the Bridge Studio, the Tower Studio, the Long Studio, or the Squish Studio on a guided hike, or attend conversations and workshops hosted by artists-in-residence during your stay.

To truly witness how global ideas emerge from this place, visit us during Shore Time, a biannual gathering hosted by Fogo Island Arts (read about the 2026 edition in this Shorefast blog).

Fogo Island’s unique geography, positioned amidst the wild waters of the Labrador Current, off the north-eastern coast of Newfoundland, influences the island’s sub-arctic, maritime climate. Our weather is temperamental, hard to predict; we like to say that Fogo Island has seven seasons, and you might experience them all in one day. Pack for all forecasts and embrace whatever the wind brings.

This climate has shaped a landscape difficult to describe. In an ever-shifting world, much of Fogo Island remains as it was: rocky coasts moulded by a millennium of stormy seas, sprawling bogs where grow strangely shaped flowers and golden-coloured berries, and coniferous forests appear between ponds and barrens. The land surprises at every bend in the road. Explore it on guided hikes, or off-trail bike rides.

Nurtured by Fogo Island’s untamed landscapes, nature reveals itself. Every season wields natural phenomena rarely seen anywhere else. From Late Fall to Winter and Pack Ice season, long nights invite you to look upwards and see skies streaked with the ethereal lights of Aurora Borealis, or blanketed by stars. From late April to June, icebergs drift past the island, which is happily positioned along Iceberg Alley. Once the icebergs carry on, the capelin comes rolling in, and the whales follow. Watch humpback whales breach the North Atlantic from June to August, or spot minke whales and, very rarely, pods of orca whales.

On land, Fogo Island is home to a beloved caribou herd that has been described as unique by Canadian caribou researchers. While caribou are usually difficult to find in other parts of the country, they can be seen here grazing along roadsides and trails, allowing for a closer connection, especially in winter. Avid birdwatchers revel in the variety of species that can be seen here, from shorebirds like plovers, to diving gannets and bald eagles, to the impressive colony of puffins that nest on Little Fogo Islands every summer. Of course, you can’t miss the foxes traipsing along backyards and, if you’re lucky, the rarer seals travelling on the sea ice, or otters frolicking along the shore.

Fogo Island Inn is a place with a purpose. What does that mean? We’re a community-centred business and an initiative of Shorefast, a Canadian charity whose vision is to make the economy work for more people in more places, starting with our home community of Fogo Island. Shorefast’s approach is to build, learn, and share business and economic development practices that serve people, nature, and culture.

Fogo Island Inn is one manifestation of this practice: all operating surpluses are reinvested in the community of Fogo Island through Shorefast’s programs and initiatives. These span a burgeoning Foodways program, Environmental Stewardship initiatives, Youth Programming, Heritage Preservation, and a set of community businesses. Learn how these operate on the island during your stay by attending community talks, events, or workshops organized by Shorefast. Ask the Guest Experiences team in the Tea Room what’s planned for when you’re on island, or inquire about visiting one of our businesses, like Fogo Island Workshops or Growlers Ice Cream. While others talk about regenerative travel, we show you how it works in practice.

The impact of your stay will continue to reverberate long after you’ve embarked on the ferry back to Farewell. In 2025, Shorefast launched the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies, a national initiative to catalyze the development of local economies, big and small.

The Institute takes our learnings from Fogo Island and brings them to communities across Canada through a series of toolsets, resources, and initiatives. One of these is our Economic Nutrition Certification Mark, which helps people understand where their money goes and how their spending makes an impact. For example, we break down the financial contribution of your stay through an Economic Nutrition label for Fogo Island Inn that shows how much went to labour, building costs, food, and more.

Interested in getting involved? See the Institute’s upcoming events and workshops, such as monthly webinars, or learn more about joining Shorenet, a dynamic national network committed to strengthening place-based economic development across Canada.

For many, a stay at Fogo Island Inn is only the beginning of their journey with us.