[1] The area was known to the Mi'kmaq as "Chegoggins" meaning place of the large fish weir, a name modified by French and English settlers to Joggins.

[3] Situated on the Cumberland Basin, a sub-basin of the Bay of Fundy, Joggins was a long established coal mining area.

Its coal seams which are exposed along the shore of the Cumberland Basin were exploited as early as 1686 by local Acadian settlers and by the British garrison at Annapolis Royal in 1715.

Joggins Mines expanded rapidly to include three churches, two cemeteries, a hotel, a roller ring, movie theater, fire department, general store, post office, railway station and school.

Joggins is a destination on the Nova Scotia Economic and Rural Development and Tourism Glooscap Trail, a spectacular twisting drive of soaring cliffs and deep valleys along the Bay of Fundy.

Mi'kmaq legend tells of the a mythical transformer, Glooscap, who created Nova Scotia and controlled the great tides with his magical powers.

The high tides have shaped the landscape into one of singular beauty; pristine beaches, dramatic rock outcrops, sea cliffs, waterfalls, and rugged forests.

In the fall the area is popular with birdwatchers; the rich marshes, originally diked by the Acadians in the 1600s, attract hundreds of thousands of migrating birds.

Joggins is famous for its record of fossils from a rainforest ecosystem approximately 310 million years ago, dating to the Pennsylvanian "Coal Age" during the Late Carboniferous Period.

[8][9] The dramatic coastal exposure of the Carboniferous (also known as Coal Age) rocks, known as the Joggins Fossil Cliffs, are continually hewn and freshly exposed by the actions of the tides in the Cumberland Basin.

Geologists were first attracted to this locality in the late 1820s with Abraham Gesner, Richard Brown, Thomas Jackson and Francis Alger all making important observations.

[12] The fossil record at Joggins figures in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and played a role in the Great Oxford Debate of 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley.

In 1852 Lyell and Dawson made a celebrated discovery of tetrapod fossils entombed within an upright tree at Coal Mine Point.

[16] The Joggins Fossil Institute continues to conduct and foster research at the site [17][18] and hosts international paleontologists and geologists and conference field-trips.

In 2007, a 14.7-km length of the coast constituting the Joggins Fossil Cliffs was nominated by Canada to UNESCO as a natural World Heritage Site.