Set in the sparkling waters of Lake Huron off the northern shore of Ontario, Manitoulin Island is a place of quiet wonder. Its name is drawn from an Anishinaabe word often rendered as "spirit island," a fitting label for a land wrapped in story. Residents and visitors alike are drawn to it for its layered history, its living Indigenous culture, its sweeping shorelines, and the wealth of plants and animals that thrive there. Life on the island has always turned on the water that surrounds it, and countless legends about that water have been told and handed down from one generation to the next.

Manitoulin holds a distinction found nowhere else: it is the largest island in the world that sits in fresh water. Yet the marvel does not stop at its shores. Dotted across the island are dozens of inland lakes, and the largest of them, Lake Manitou, is itself the biggest lake to be found on any freshwater island on the planet; a handful of those inland lakes even cradle small islands of their own. Rolling farmland gives way to pale ridges of limestone and quartzite, part of the escarpment that threads through the region, while Little Current and Gore Bay serve as the busiest of the island's communities.