Taste of life as an islander
Fogo Island Inn links guests with community ambassadors to explore region with locals
HEATHER GREENWOOD DAVIS SPECIAL TO THE STAR
JOE BATT’S ARM, N.L.— Al Dwyer is leaning up against a window in the front room of the Fogo Island Inn when I meet him. Something about him looks slightly out of place.
His baseball cap and brown runners don’t necessarily stand out in the room where innkeepers run about in fairly casual outfits. It could be the fact he’s not swooning at the decor or snapping photos of the icebergs through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Or that he is, instead, shifting from foot to foot like a racehorse waiting for the gate to open.
Standing still isn’t for him, he later explains. Showing people around the island? “I love that.”
Dwyer is one of Fogo Island Inn’s most popular community ambassadors — part of a program that matches locals with the hotel’s guests for a glimpse into life on the island. Guests are encouraged to leave the comforts of the 29-suite stilted perch to explore the surrounds with an unscripted local and no set itinerary.
Until recently, Fogo Island hasn’t been a tourist destination. The 35kilometer-long, 24-kilometre-wide strip just off the mainland isn’t easily found on a map and for centuries no one saw tourism value in the barren lands.
Only when local-girl-turned-multimillionaire-philanthropist Zita Cobb returned and announced her intention to build a sustainable, architectural stunner of a hotel did things begin to change. The hotel opened in 2013. Today, visitors to the island more than double the island’s population of about 2,600.
Dwyer is as shocked as anyone that it has become a hot spot. “Who would want to come here?” he remembers having thought. “What could we possibly have to offer?”
When it first opened, the luxurious hotel did more than provide a reason for tourists to visit. True to Cobb’s intention to create jobs and foster cultural resiliency, it opened a door to a long-closed community.
“The project — because it’s much more a project than a building — is about bringing things together, old and new. Things from here and things from away,” explains director of design and development, Kingman Brewster, during a tour of the hotel. “The building reflects those two opposing forces coming together in one building.”
While you might have originally described Dwyer, a retired schoolteacher whose family history on the island dates back to the early 1800s, as one of those “opposing forces,” that is no longer the case.
“I think it has done great things for the island,” Dwyer says as we drive through the small communities on the hotel’s doorstep. “People come here and they don’t want to leave.”
If all of the ambassadors are as laid back and salt of the earth as Dwyer, visitors are in for a treat.
He doesn’t just point out the sights from the car, he brings me into his simple island life. We visit the spaces where friends have lived and worked, and places he ran free as a child. We move slowly along the community’s curving roads and stop often to take photos. Here to try to capture the bright, bold colours of the painted cabins that dot the waterfront; there to walk through the time-worn fishing stages he worked on as a child.
He tells me about the brutal relationship between the area’s first immigrants and the First Nations that had been here long before and seems genuinely saddened by the fact I won’t be able to “bring a bottle” and pop in to talk with the locals at a party at Foley’s Shed in Tilting before I leave the island.
Had I not set out with Dwyer, the island would have still been open to me. The hotel offers opportunities to forage in season, tours of the gorgeous Fogo Island Arts studios, including the one where actress Gwyneth Paltrow recently hid away, and is helpful with suggesting routes for those who’d prefer to explore on their own.
Yet being out with Dwyer offers a unique opportunity to dive deeper, faster. In between stories and iceberg sightings, we spend a lot of our afternoon tooting the horn and waving. Upon our return to the hotel, its striking architecture seems out of place with all I’ve experienced in the area. Its exterior is cold and angular. It sits on seemingly spindly legs above a rocky shore with loud, crashing waves at its side and the jagged translucent blue of the icebergs in the distance.
But like the community it lives in, those impressions are only one small part of the story. It’s the warmth and comfort beneath the surface that makes it worth exploring. Heather Greenwood Davis’s visit to Fogo Island was part of a press trip for the launch of the 2017 Cadillac XT5.