St. John's Audio Tours

St. John's sits on the easternmost point of North America (excluding Greenland), a harbor town tucked behind a rocky headland on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. John Cabot may have arrived here on June 24, 1497. What's certain is that it became a permanent settlement before Plymouth Rock was a destination, before Boston had a single house, before almost anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere that English is spoken. It burned to the ground five times between 1816 and 1892, and rebuilt itself each time in colored wood.

Those colors are why people photograph the city.

The famous Jelly Bean Row houses on Gower Street and around the harbor were painted in vivid reds, yellows, and blues when the coal soot stopped darkening facades in the 20th century. Signal Hill rises above the narrows where the harbor meets the North Atlantic, and it was there, in 1901, that Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless message. In 1919, Alcock and Brown took off from a field near St. John's on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.