The Top 10 Experiences for a Visit to Normandy & Brittany
Visit northwest France for the appealing climate, proximity to the sea, rich history, and phenomenal cuisine. Whether your tastes run from walking along dramatic cliffside views or dancing into the night to the wail of bagpipes at a traditional fest-noz (night festival) in some little-known Breton village, there’s more than a lifetime’s worth of things to explore. Start planning your trip to Normandy and Brittany with this list of the top 10 experiences.
1. Feeling like you’re inside an Impressionist painting in Monet’s garden at Giverny, where the natural world has been tended into a living masterpiece.
2. Paying your respects at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, a haunting sanctuary on the blustery Norman coast, where the massed ranks of silent graves tell the true cost of the D-Day landings.
3. Swilling cider and watching the dancing to bagpipes at a fest-noz. These Celtic night festivals take place in villages across Brittany and pulse with traditional food, dance, and song.
4. Beach-hopping to find your favorite spot along the coastline, whether you prefer dramatic, lonely cliffside strands or striped beach umbrellas.
5. Being wowed by the Église Saint-Joseph, a giant poured-concrete kaleidoscope of a building with a Technicolor interior—a stunning example of Le Havre’s modernist architecture.
6. Pretending you’re a French corsair as you tour the granite ramparts of Saint-Malo, which look like they’ve been carved from the ocean itself.
7. Exploring the abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel, the Gothic monument that towers high above a tidal plain and seems like it belongs more to fantasy fiction rather than the real world.
8. Gorging on both regions’ extraordinary seafood traditions, from a bowl of piping hot mussels and cream to oysters washed down with chilled Chablis, all in sight of the waves from which they were farmed.
9. Marveling at the mysteries behind the stones of Carnac, questioning how early Bretons ever managed to drag into place the largest collection of prehistoric standing stones in the world.
10. Cycling the narrow roads of Brittany’s many different islands, strange and separate worlds from the mainland—from the Île-de-Bréhat, with its dazzling vistas of contrasting scale, texture, and light, to the windswept and ragged Île d’Ouessant on Europe’s westernmost edge.
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