The fog lifts, and France appears where you least expect it: 25 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland. Brightly coloured wooden houses, French tricolour flags, the smell of fresh bread drifting out of bakeries. Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, the last French territory in North America, fits into an archipelago of fog and peat bogs that is home to some six thousand residents. For cruise passengers on Canada and New England itineraries, the port call has the perfectly delightful flavour of a geographical anomaly.

Landing in France, a stone's throw from Canada

Ships dock at the port of Saint-Pierre, a few minutes' walk from the centre. No shuttle, no oversized terminal: you walk down the gangway and change countries. The euro replaces the dollar, licence plates become French, and conversation switches to French with an accent that blends Brittany, Normandy and the Basque Country, homelands of the founding sailors. The town can be explored on foot, between gently sloping streets and wooden façades painted bright red, blue and yellow to pierce the greyness of foggy days.

A story of cod and whisky

For four centuries, the archipelago lived from the great cod fishery on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The Musée Héritage preserves its memory: dories, rigging, photographs of the stone beaches where the fish was dried. But the most entertaining chapter remains that of American Prohibition: in the 1920s, Saint-Pierre became the legal hub for liquor bound for the United States. The port's warehouses overflowed with cases of whisky, and local legend has it that Al Capone himself passed through here. The museum guides tell the story of this era with infectious relish.

Île aux Marins, a village suspended in time

A ten-minute crossing from the port, Île aux Marins is the jewel of the port call. This fishing village, which had more than six hundred souls at the beginning of the 20th century, gradually emptied; its houses, church, lighthouse and former school have been preserved just as they were. You wander the grassy paths between the buildings, push open the door of the small Archipélitude museum and walk past the rusty wreck stranded on the shore. On a clear day, the view looks back toward the town and its colourful rooftops; in fog, the place takes on the solemnity of the end of the world. The excursion, short and easy, leaves a lasting impression.

French flavours of the Americas

• Croissants and baguettes from the town's bakeries, baked just as in mainland France.
• Cold-water fish and seafood, served in the restaurants along the harbour front.
• Duty-free products and local specialties, including jams made from bog berries.

Simply walking

Beyond the town, trails lead to ponds, wind-battered capes and viewpoints over Miquelon and Langlade, the archipelago's large wild islands. Walkers come across free-roaming horses, puffins in season, and that particular silence of subarctic lands, broken only by the wind and the cries of seabirds.

Farewell in the fog

On departure, the colourful houses fade one by one behind the grey curtain, and the ship is back in Canadian waters within a few miles. The passengers, for their part, take longer to leave the archipelago: you don't expect to find France here, and it's precisely this mismatch that gives the port call its enduring charm. Some tiny territories occupy an outsized place in memory; Saint-Pierre and Miquelon is one of them.