5 days in… Brittany

Day 1: Vannes, hot chocolate and browsing 

I love wandering around Vannes for a day, with its wonderful shops on steep cobbled streets and specialist hot chocolate cafés in quiet courtyards. If you’re new to Brittany, this is a good time to make your first foray into Breton drinks and food, which are generally rich, sweet and buttery. If you something is “Breton style” on a menu, it quite often means that salt caramel has been added in somewhere. The street market, considered one of France’s finest, is on Wednesdays and Saturdays and is a great place to pick up ingredients for dinner or a few snacks for lunch, which you can take down to the Ramparts des Vannes.

These are neat gardens which take their name from the towering walls that have been added to and occasionally rebuilt over many turbulent centuries. They make a fine spot for a picnic and there’s even a tiny antique shop built into the space under the stone steps down from street level to the waterside gardens. If you’re self-catering, make a stop at Tea & Cie and browse from their hundreds of loose-leaf varieties.  You’ll never even bother unpacking the teabags you brought with you.  

Day 2: Quiberon, beaches and more beaches

For the second day, I’d recommend exerting yourself a little. Only a little of course, this is still essentially a beach holiday. From Vannes, an hour’s drive takes you to the Quiberon peninsula, with the road at times squeezing onto a strip of land so narrow you can almost touch the sea from your car on both sides. Once the isthmus broadens out you have a choice to make. To your right (aka the west) as you approach is the Côte Sauvage, so called for the way the waves of the Atlantic batter it with heavy surf, while on the other side the water is millpond calm in the lee of the land. Beaches on the Côte Sauvage tend to have no facilities as swimming is technically prohibited due to the strength of the currents, but you’ll see plenty of surfers there anyway.

You can spend a couple of hours paddling, exploring the rocks, caves and quiet, then nip across to the east coast, where boats bob in peaceful harbours and waterfront restaurants can serve you a fine lunch and a glass of wine before you go for a gentle post-prandial float. St Pierre, towards the northern end of the peninsula, is a personal favourite. One good tip for visiting Quiberon is to go early, as the narrow road gets very crowded. The French will generally wander down around mid morning, so keen tourists making a quick start will find themselves usefully out of sync with the bulk of the traffic and end up with the beaches of the Côte Sauvage largely to themselves for a while. 

Day 3: Becherel and books 

On day three, it’s time to get cultural, with a visit to Becherel, a place that surpasses even Hay-on-Wye for bookshop density, with 15 individual shops and a population of less than 1,000. The old town is one of France’s petite cités de caractére, so designated for the remnants of a 12th-century fort which are still visible and the well-preserved state of buildings from many other eras. A bumble and a browse are great at any time of year but, if you time it right, you could attend one of the many literary events that the town hosts.

In spring, there’s the European festival of Ancient Greek and Latin, National Poetry weekend and the Fête du Livre on Easter weekend, October is the Reading Festival and December the ‘Treasures of Becherel’. While you could certainly find a few good places to eat in Becherel, you might also want to explore Rennes or, as I was once recommended by Anoushka Lewis, owner of Le Manoir Caché, make a detour west on the way back to Vannes and visit Crêperie Des Forges near Cadoret. It might seem a bit much to make a special trip for a pancake, but Anoushka swears by the magic of the riverside setting and superb cooking. 

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Day 4: Rochefort en Terre, flowers and steampunk witches

At first, this might seem like a similar day to the Becherel trip but the place has one peculiarity that always draws me a back. The town of Rochefort en Terre, 40 minutes’ drive east of Vannes is another of the petites Cités de Caractère but also one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, an accreditation created in the 80s to highlight the beauty of France’s rural communities. It is indeed a beautiful town, perhaps shading into too much of a tourist trap despite the undoubted charm of strolling its old streets.

The thing that sets it apart, very far apart, from other villages in the organisation, is the Naia Museum. Named for a self-proclaimed witch who used to live in the ruins of the church around which the museum has been constructed. It’s a surreal, steampunk, fantastical gallery and museum, full of bizarre creations housed in the old building, the grounds and the catacombs where, on my last visit, a great orb of light was spinning patterns on the walls. Opening hours vary but are every day in summer, while closure for most of January gives the gallery time to overhaul some of its works and get even more bizarre.  

 

Day 5: Concarneau, boats and island lunches 

For the final day, go out with a bang and a boat. Controversially, this is not about the Gulf of Morbihan, the bay just south of Vannes. Morbihan is beautiful and worth exploring, with boats running out to Île-d’Arz and the other islands, but I’d advise skipping the tour of the bay, in which a glass-topped ferry slowly trawls past people swimming, windsurfing and sunbathing, without letting you out to actually do any of those things.

The boat trip I’ve actually got in mind leaves from Concarneau, a couple of hours’ drive west. It delivers you to Île Saint Nicolas, one of a collection of scraps of sand known as Îles des Glénan, which has nothing on it except a few beaches, a bar and a restaurant, Les Viviers des Glénan. The menu is decided one day in advance, so as well as booking your table and the boat trip (separately), you need to phone the day before to make your choice of two main courses, often whole crab or lobster and one other dish. Combine that dish with a cold bottle of white wine, classic Breton desserts and digestifs, and you have a lovely lunch surrounded by the sparkling sea. After you’ve eaten, stroll along the boardwalks and pick your spot on the sand to sunbathe a little then slide into the clearest water you’ve ever swum in. It’s a memory of Brittany that will stay with you forever.    

 

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