Baie Verte, Newfoundland Labrador, is a charming town nestled on the north coast of the island portion of the Canadian province. With a population of 1,311 as of 2021, this town is a gem on the Baie Verte Peninsula. The French named the area for its lush greenness, translating to "green bay."
Baie Verte is one of the 42 communities that make up the Emerald Zone, located in the North Central portion of Newfoundland. The town's history dates back to the late 19th century, but it remained a small village until the mid-1950s. The discovery of asbestos and other ore bodies of copper, lead, zinc, and gold led to a major expansion. Bowering Brother's steamers frequented the area in the 1950s to transport the ore found here. Baie Verte officially became a town in 1968. The major Baie Verte fault line starts here and runs all the way to Long Island Sound by way of Vermont.
The Baie Verte asbestos deposit was discovered in 1955, and Advocate Mines, a division of the giant Johns-Manville Company, began open-pit mining there in 1963. The town was gripped by a strike by asbestos miners over working conditions in the 1970s, which lasted for 15 weeks. The Advocate mine shut down in 1981, reopened in 1982 by Transpacific Asbestos Ltd., but closed permanently in 1990. The Point Rousse Project, located within the Baie Verte Mining District on the Point Rousse/Ming's Bight Peninsula, covers three prospective gold trends: the Scrape Trend, the Goldenville Trend, and the Deer Cove Trend. These trends have approximately 20 km of cumulative strike length and include three deposits (Pine Cove, Stog’er Tight, and Argyle). Anaconda Mining has been mining at the Pine Cove open pit mine in Baie Verte continuously since 2010, producing in excess of 118,028 ounces of gold.
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Baie Verte had a population of 1,311 living in 556 of its 647 total private dwellings. This represented a slight change of -0.2% from its 2016 population of 1,313. With a land area of 371.37 km2 (143.39 sq mi), it had a population density of 3.5/km2 (9.1/sq mi) in 2021.
