Lake Winnipeg
About 90 min north of Winnipeg along the west shore is the town of Gimli. A unique beach community on Lake Winnipeg, it's a town with many dimensions and with a lot of history.
Bill Barlow is a high school teacher and mayor of Gimli. "I applied for a teaching job and was interviewed and hired, well I guess it's almost 32 years ago now" he recalls. "Once I was here, once I had this job, the reason I stayed had a whole lot to do with geography. I mean here we are on the shores of one of the world's Great Lakes -- an absolutely remarkable body of water. But there were other things too. I mean the whole story of the ethnic groups that made Gimli what it is."
The first Europeans to settle on the lake were the Icelanders who arrived in 1875. Fleeing difficult times including volcanoes the first arrivals liked what they saw. Their new paradise Gimli was teeming with fish And in the woodlands game and berries in abundance.
The Icelanders received exclusive settlement right to an area of 812 sq. km, and until 1877, they operated as their own independent republic. Today Gimli is the lake's largest community. It's a full service town. And many are choosing to live in Gimli and commute to their jobs in Winnipeg.
It's to the original settler's hard work and tolerance that Barlow attributes his town uniqueness. "There's the whole ethnic cultural thing, And there's just that spirit of tolerance, that sort of progressive view of where this community is in terms of the world around us, That is extremely attractive. It's a great place to be."
Today's Gimli is a community of about 2,000 permanent residents. It's surrounded by the rural municipality of Gimli, with another 3,500 permanent residents. In the summertime, of course the populations quadruples with summer residents.
"As you move north of the harbour," says Barlow "there's a full kilometer of very excellent beach which on a hot summer weekend will have four or five thousand people basking in the sun and dipping in those great refreshing waters of Lake Winnipeg. But here we are, we're on the shores of this great lake and it's so much a part of the history of Gimli. We have here in Gimli one of the finest harbors that you'll find anywhere between the Lakehead and Vancouver. It's a prairie harbour, and we have here a prairie ocean. And I think people are always surprised when they come and can't believe it's in the Canadian prairie."
Gimli is the scene every year of a large Icelandic cultural festival. Islendingadagurinn (which means the day of the Icelander) is celebrated on the national 3 day weekend here in August. "This little town of two thousand has about 30,000-35,000 in it for that celebration," says Barlow. "It's a great celebration of that cultural fact, that those people in the face of incredible hardship, established here a great foundation for a wonderful community."
Perhaps the town's name gives it a certain cache. According to mayor Barlow "Gimli is a place in Norse mythology where the righteous spend eternity. The fact that the early settlers in spite of having gone through a horrible winter and disease and still had the vision to name this place Gimli, which is a kind of paradise."
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