Pointe-au-Pic

The Ultimate Tourist Village

POINT-AU-PIC (Area of the City of La Malbaie)

The municipality owes its name to the existence of a mountainous point located southwest of La Malbaie. It all began with the seigneury of La Malbaie, whose boundaries stretched from Les Éboulements to Saint-Siméon.

The municipality of Saint-Étienne de la Malbaie was born in 1845. Successively detached from it were the villages of La Malbaie in 1896, then Rivière-Malbaie, Clermont, and Pointe-au-Pic. La Malbaie attained city status in 1958, but in the 1990s, a municipal integration process brought it back to its original size with the merger of several entities, including Pointe-au-Pic in 1995. Pointe-au-Pic thus appears today, despite a merger, as an entity that had its own historical and administrative identity for several decades.

Unlike several villages in the Charlevoix region, where village settlements typically take place at the bottom of the Charlevoix plateau, occupying a narrow strip of land along the river, or more rarely on the top of the plateau, Pointe-au-Pic benefits from a gradual descent from the plateau. Thus, several levels of occupation succeed one another, small fragile plateaus where the relief asserts its irregularities here and there.

This unique configuration gave rise, as early as the 19th century, to a tourist craze that has enabled the current offering of accommodation and dining options. Moreover, the reconfiguration of the harbor and the addition of the Charlevoix Train ensure unparalleled prosperity.