L'Île-d'Orléans Regional County Municipality

This guide to the Île-d'Orléans Regional County Municipality, just outside Quebec City, opens with Jacques Cartier stepping ashore in 1535 and mistaking wild grapevines along the southern shore for a sign of Bacchus, only for the French crown to overrule his name for the island within the year. It follows the settlers who arrived in the 1650s planting wheat instead of chasing gold, and the law that still keeps nearly the whole island as farmland today. You'll hear about the coat of arms motto promising to welcome and feed, and the certification mark that guards produce here from imitators. Listen for how a roadside stand in late June still carries the echo of that first, mistaken impression.