Normandy and Brittany together make up the northwest bulge of France, two regions with very different personalities sharing a long Atlantic and Channel coastline. They are linked by ferry routes, by the pilgrimage island of Mont Saint-Michel on the border between them, and by a shared sense of distance from Paris.
Normandy is apple country — cider, calvados, and camembert are its calling cards — and it carries the weight of the Second World War more visibly than almost anywhere else in Europe. The D-Day landing beaches run along the Calvados coast from Caen west through Bayeux (the town that survived intact and still holds the tapestry). Inland, Giverny has Monet's house and the garden he painted obsessively for thirty years. The Seine meanders through the region past the medieval city of Rouen and the spectacular chalk cliffs of Étretat. The Norman coast resorts — Deauville, Trouville, Honfleur — have a distinct Belle Époque seaside character.
Brittany feels Celtic and proud of it. The language is still spoken, the food runs to galettes, crêpes, and cider rather than wine, and the landscape turns wilder the further west you go. Saint-Malo is the corsair city, walled and rakish; Dinan is a medieval market town perched above a river. The megalithic alignments at Carnac are the largest in the world — thousands of standing stones in rows stretching across the heath, and nobody is entirely sure why. Quimper and Rennes anchor the interior.
