The old harbour and its seven-storey houses, the largest wooden church in France, the painters' studios: Honfleur is an hour's drive from your cottage in Luc-sur-Mer.
Honfleur fits into a handkerchief: a rectangular basin, narrow slate-clad houses reflected in the water, and behind them a tangle of cobbled lanes. This is where Boudin, and then Monet, Jongkind and Courbet learned to paint the light of the estuary — the Honfleur school, out of which Impressionism grew. It makes a full day out: an hour along the coast, and in the evening, back to the quiet of the Côte de Nacre. La Capricieuse, a five-star Yelloh Village campsite, is the base camp: cottages, a heated water park, a restaurant on site and the beach at the end of the lane.
The coast road through Cabourg, Houlgate and Trouville is far lovelier than the motorway and barely longer: a quarter of an hour more, with a few stops thrown in.
The whole centre lies within five hundred metres of the basin: Honfleur is walked, without ever getting back in the car.
The car parks by the basin fill up by mid-morning in summer. Arriving early also means seeing the quays before the crowds — and finishing the day on the Côte de Grâce at sunset.
Dug on Colbert's orders in 1681 and lined with houses of two to seven storeys, narrow because tax was then levied on the width of a façade. Pleasure yachts have replaced the cod boats, but the setting has not moved: it is the most painted subject in Normandy after the cliffs of Étretat.
The last remnant of the ramparts, the former Caen gate turned into the king's lieutenant's lodging. It was from this port that Samuel de Champlain sailed to found Quebec in 1608. Recently restored, it now houses a trail on the maritime history of the town.
The largest wooden church in France, built with the axe by shipwrights in the aftermath of the Hundred Years' War. Twin naves whose vaults look like upturned hulls, and a belfry planted apart to spare the building the weight of the bells and the risk of lightning.
Two vast stone halls built in 1670 to store the cod fishermen's salt — ten thousand tonnes of it under an oak frame raised, again, by shipwrights. They now host exhibitions and concerts, two streets from the basin.
Boudin was born here in 1824; it was he who pushed the young Monet to paint outdoors. The museum brings together his skies, those of Jongkind and Dufy and the canvases of the painters who settled at the Saint-Siméon farm — the finest Impressionist collection on the coast.
Behind the quays: the rue Haute, the rue de la Prison, the rue des Lingots — half-timbered fronts, slates down to the ground, painters' studios and galleries. Five hundred metres of lanes in which it is a pleasure to get lost at the end of the afternoon.
Photo credits: Zairon, Daniel Villafruela, Ibex73, René Hourdry, SimonCourtecuisse, stephanemat, Bybbisch94, Christian Gebhardt, Calips — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA / CC0) · Eugène Boudin, public domain.
Photo: Calips · CC BY-SA 3.0Above the town stands a 17th-century chapel covered in votive offerings: model ships hanging from the vault, given by sailors who came home alive. A step away, the calvary and the Mont Joli open onto the entire Seine estuary, from the Pont de Normandie to Le Havre. The finest viewpoint of the day, above all when the light comes down onto the water.
Five-star cottages, a heated water park and the beach fifty metres away, in Luc-sur-Mer.
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