The sea was blue, the beach was gold and the children skipping through the sand dunes seemed a testament to the healthy joys of holidays in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Tourist officials and the national government in Ottawa were delighted with the promotional clip, part of a £14m attempt to offset controversy over oil extraction in Alberta’s beautiful wildlands.
But hours of sleuthing by a puzzled sailing enthusiast, aware that Alberta has no coastline, have revealed that the idyll was filmed 5,000 miles away across the Atlantic. The girl with the flying hair and her friend were romping on the sweep of sand at Beadnell Bay near Bamburgh, Northumberland, where the North Sea rolls in from Lindisfarne.
“We think it’s quite funny - a landlocked province in Canada presenting an image of itself as an island,” said Sheelagh Caygill of Northumberland Tourism, which is now fondly hoping to piggy-back on the international campaign. News of the gaffe is spreading like wildfire on the internet with tags such as: “Come to Alberta - no, wait, it’s Britain.”
read more….