Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

Where it sits. Lunenburg occupies a hilly peninsula between two harbours on Nova Scotia's South Shore, about 90 km southwest of Halifax by Highway 103 and Route 3. The front harbour faces southeast toward the Atlantic and holds the wharves, the fisheries museum and the schooner berths; the back harbour is quieter water used by yards and small craft. The Old Town climbs the slope between them in a hard grid that ignores the topography entirely, which is why the cross streets are steep enough to make brakes squeal.

A town laid out on paper in London. Lunenburg was founded in 1753 as part of a British scheme to settle Protestant colonists in Nova Scotia and dilute Acadian and Mi'kmaq influence. Around 1,450 so-called Foreign Protestants — mostly German-speakers from the Palatinate and Württemberg, plus Swiss and Montbéliardais French — were shipped from Rotterdam to Halifax and then here. Surveyors imposed a rigid 48-block model plan on the hillside before anyone arrived, and that plan survives almost unaltered, which is precisely why UNESCO inscribed Old Town Lunenburg as a World Heritage Site in 1995: it is the best-preserved example of a planned British colonial settlement in North America. Around 70 percent of the buildings in the old core date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What the architecture actually does. The signature local feature is the Lunenburg bump, a dormer that projects over the front door and overhangs the street, typically five-sided, developed from the Scottish dormer and multiplied here into a town-wide habit. Add wooden clapboard, decorative brackets, and paint schemes of saturated red, teal, yellow and violet applied with no restraint whatsoever, and the streetscape reads as almost cartoonish until you realise it is genuine and load-bearing. St. John's Anglican Church on Cumberland Street, begun in 1753 with timbers from Boston and rebuilt over generations into a black-and-white Carpenter Gothic landmark, burned catastrophically on Halloween night in 2001 and was painstakingly reconstructed and rededicated in 2005. The Lunenburg Academy of 1895, a mansard-roofed wooden school on Gallows Hill, is visible from every approach road.

Fish, and the Bluenose. The town's wealth came from the Grand Banks salt-cod fishery and the schooners that worked it. The Smith and Rhuland yard on the waterfront launched the Bluenose in 1921, designed by William Roué as both a working fishing schooner and a racer; she beat the American challengers repeatedly, became a national emblem and has been on the Canadian ten-cent coin since 1937. Bluenose II, launched from the same yard in 1963 and rebuilt in the 2010s, is home-ported here and sails a public schedule in summer. The Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic occupies the old processing plant on the wharf, with the schooner Theresa E. Connor and the trawler Cape Sable tied alongside.

On screen. Lunenburg and the harbours immediately around it are Nova Scotia's most-used drama location, and their standard job is to play the coast of Maine. Taylor Hackford's Dolores Claiborne (1995), from the Stephen King novel, set on the fictional Little Tall Island, shot on the South Shore with Lunenburg and neighbouring communities supplying the village, the harbour and the ferry, and a purpose-built clifftop house for the Donovan estate. The Syfy series Haven (2010-2015), also King-derived and also set in Maine, worked out of Chester, Hubbards and Lunenburg for five seasons, which is why the town's storefronts are familiar to people who have never been to Canada. Producers come for the same reasons UNESCO did: an unbroken period streetscape, working wharves, and no visual anachronism to paint out.

Getting there and timing. Drive from Halifax in about an hour and a quarter; there is no useful rail or transit, and the Old Town is best left on foot once you park at the waterfront or on Montague Street. The grid is steep — Lincoln and Pelham are the two flatter streets to walk — and the sidewalks are uneven brick and slate, so mobility is genuinely constrained in the upper town. Peak season runs late June to early September, with the Folk Harbour Festival in August; the restaurant scene, which is unusually good for a town of 2,300, thins out sharply after Thanksgiving in mid-October. Late September and early October give warm sea, low light on the coloured facades, and space on the wharf. Winter is quiet, cold and windy, with a handful of places open and a very different, working-town character.