Don’t be fooled by St. Pierre and Miquelon’s proximity to Canada (it’s 13 miles or a 45-minute ferry ride from Fortune, Newfoundland)—the tiny archipelago is France’s last foothold in North America. Euros are the currency. Brie, baguettes, boulangeries, and bouteilles de vin are staples. If the straight out of St.-Germain-des-Prés French accents don’t get you, everything closing down at lunchtime will. Just as the town church bell rings noon, you hear the vroom of Renaults and Citroëns racing down St. Pierre’s narrow streets. Within five minutes, it’s like a ghost town as everyone sits down to quiche or croque monsieurs at home. Still not convinced? Check out the guillotine in the L’Arche Musée, the only one in North America (it was used just once, in 1889).

St. Pierre and Miquelon is not just otherworldly because of its lunar landscape (the bog, the subarctic meadows, and the craggy coast recall parts of Newfoundland or Iceland), but because it’s also an actual bit of living France on a windswept archipelago in the North Atlantic that so few people know about. Visitors have described it as surreal. The whole time you’re there, you might feel like an extra in some French seacoast saga.

The islands were once a kind of cod El Dorado, luring fishermen from Brittany, Normandy, and the Basque country to its shores. They were already fishing the waters before French explorer Jacques Cartier landed on St. Pierre and Miquelon in 1563, claiming the territory for the king of France. The British and French fought over the islands for the next few centuries before France finally fully negotiated ownership in 1816. After the cod-fishing industry faded, St. Pierre reinvented itself as a giant booze depot during Prohibition. In fact, it became the biggest alcohol warehouse in North America where the henchmen of Al Capone would pick up legally imported French wine and Canadian whiskey to be smuggled into the U.S.

Today, 6,000 French citizens live on St. Pierre, with 600 more on the wilder, naturally spectacular Miquelon. Together, the islands are a hidden gem, with colorful rows of houses and its history of fishermen and rum running. Plus, they offer some of the finest French seafood anywhere. “You can’t even find us on a map,” says Patricia Detcheverry, who runs a website about living in St. Pierre and Miquelon as well as St. Pierre’s most charming hotel, Nuits Saint-Pierre. “But we’re really a unique place.”