Brittany, France

[JManc]

Brittany looks somewhat Britain-y. I wonder who influenced who.

[mousquet]

^ 6 Celtic nations.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations

Black: Brittany
Yellow: Cornwall
Green: Ireland
Beige: Isle of Man
Blue: Scotland
Red: Wales

I don't know anything much about stories of ethnicity or local cultures in detail (I'm from Paris, huh) and European history is a mess anyway.
But there may be something common related to these regions indeed.

[Architype]

Everything looks very well preserved, is there support from government to maintain these touristy areas, and do people actually live in the oldest places? I have some Cornwall ancestry too, maybe even Brittany, but too long ago to trace.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by Architype

Everything looks very well preserved, is there support from government to maintain these touristy areas, and do people actually live in the oldest places?

Old buildings and fabrics draw tourists. They're fine places for retail. Yes, they are lived in, whether for business or dwelling.

As for subsidies, I can't tell.
First, the French welfare state is a hellish pile of technocracy, so you'd have to be an expert to track public money.
I guess the region gets some money from the central government, then Brittany's regional council deals with their own matters the way they want to.
And they have their own revenues. They're not helpless.
Second, it's not just Brittany. Entire France, every region in this country has a massive heritage that's bigger than the French state itself.
Recently, I read that some 35,000 castles and manors were recorded in the country. We'd be the country with the largest heritage of that kind worldwide.
It takes a lot of money and passionate people to maintain all this stuff. But I think it's worth it, because sometimes, when you're tired of your modern environment, you like to go back to the past and learn about it, just to take your mind off your everyday life...
So the heritage should be preserved as much as it can be, cause it's entertaining to the people from all over the world. It is also educative, not only entertaining.

[mousquet]

There's a trail they call GR 34 (grande randonnée 34) in Brittany. It is over 2,000 km (1,250-mile) long, following the entire coastline of the peninsula.
This is a famous spot along the trail, known as Pointe-du-Raz in the département of Finistère. It's some of the westernmost spot of Brittany. There's no more land beyond. Only the Atlantic ocean.











Back in the days, the area was unsafe to sail when weather and the sea would be bad.
There's something they call "Baie des Trépassés" (Bay of the Dead) nearby. That's where they usually found the corpses from shipwrecks.
So there's this statue of a sailor begging Mary for mercy.





When you don't feel fear of height or dizzy, you may get closer to cliffs like this guy does.



The only implicit rule is not to walk on plants, cause the many tourists would crush and kill them all.
And please, don't fall down. Locals wouldn't like to pick up your wreck down there.





The region is known for her endless cliffs facing the ocean.
They're not as tall or wild as some of Hawaii I saw in pictures, but it seems they never end. That's why GR 34, that goes on and on. You may walk for days or weeks like this.
Some fanatics do it, kind of like those hiking the Alps. They say it's healthy.











I must say, people living there have quite a decent backyard.

[MolsonExport]

Looks fantastic. I haven't been lucky enough to tour that part of France during my many visits to your fabulous country (most recently, this year, where I was in Paris and Dijon).


What's the deal with the plethora of fleur-de-lys flags?

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

What's the deal with the plethora of fleur-de-lys flags?

Québec has a small area of theirs to advertise their region in Saint-Malo. No big deal, there's nothing wrong with it.
You should be glad about it, cause it's still Canada, eh.
In Brittany, you'll most often see the French tricolor and this.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Brittany

Gwenn-ha-du, dude!
That's their regional flag, and it looks cool.

[MolsonExport]

good on both counts. I was born and raised in Québec.

[mousquet]

Quimper on a sorry rainy day.













This town is known for her faience whose style has been popular for ages in the country.
So this store full of tourists sells plenty of it.



It's actually a little larger than it seems from the outside, going deep behind the façade.
They've got a bit of everything, from cheap large-scale manufacturing €10 bowls to collectable handmade €4,000 plates and €5,000 tea-pots.
Make sure you take off your backpack in there, not to break anything expensive out of clumsiness.



If you're into cars, this is called Citroën Traction Avant, was "the world's first mass-produced, semi-monocoque bodied, front-wheel drive car".



There were tons of them in France in the 1940s.

[mousquet]

This estate known as "domaine de Trévarez", built from 1893 to 1907 was one of the last so called castles built in France.





The most striking bit of history to this castle is actually World War 2.
It was occupied by German and Japanese submariners. Sailors who served on their submarines to sink allied ships and supply.
And the mansion sits on a hillside, so the Germans could see everything below, in the valley, which seriously annoyed local activists of the French Resistance.







So they eventually asked for allies to bomb out the castle.
In a night of July of 1944, the British Royal Air Force dropped 6 bombs on the site, 4 on target.
The mansion was badly damaged and almost collapsed, with the roof almost entirely destroyed.
I can't tell how accurate hearsay would be, but it is said that no one in there would survive.
Members of the Resistance were waiting for German and Japanese Navy men with machine guns. They took no prisoner. All those who could escape the mansion on fire were slaughtered dressed in their pyjamas, including their French girlfriends in the confusion.
That's what you call war crime, but I guess the French Resistance had gone through so much torture by the Gestapo and the SS that they would make no difference from regular Navy men.
As for French women who were in relationships with German soldiers without working for the Resistance as spies, they obviously were regarded as traitorous sluts and would have had their heads shaved on public squares as humiliation to punish them. But those in that castle didn't even have that privilege. They simply were machine gunned down with their boyfriends.
That's the gruesome story. Beware of the French... They may act as savages when they're really upset.

Today, it is a sad thing to see the mansion still shows the stigmas by the war. It's a masterpiece of late Victorian architecture with some Art Nouveau and Breton elements.
It belongs to the council of the département du Finistère (a département is a counterpart of a US county) and they probably don't have enough money to allocate to it to restore it to its former glory.





I know some of you guys are curious about interiors, but frankly, that one is disappointing.
Pretty much everything was destroyed by the WWII bombing.



The library is fake. All books burned 80 years ago.



Also, you can't visit the baseground where servants had to work or the 2nd floor, cause walls are full of lead, so they rightfully don't want to expose visitors to that unhealthy material.
There were some innovative features to that mansion, such as modern toilet bowls.



They say that was brand new in the 1890s. I can't tell, I wasn't born yet.
There was also some sort of regular heating.



Some sort of modern bathroom (I would miss a shower in there, though).



The aristocrat who had the mansion built was proud because even his servants had an elevator, so they could serve him and his many guests faster.
Otherwise, there still was the good old staircase to take you to the servant rooms.



This bedroom was actually more or less restored to the original thing.



There were laundries and utility rooms like this.



Some fireplaces and ornaments were kind of spared from destruction.





















This steel structure of the roof is the only one thing that prevented the mansion from collapsing in 1944.
If it wasn't for those steel beams, the building would no longer exist at all.



The Finistère council does a good job at maintaining the park, though. They carefully grow plants all year long, so the gardens would look different and nice on every season.
I never saw it in the winter, but they say it's ok anytime of the year.
There is room for several styles of gardens, formal French, Italian and English.
The Italian section is my favorite.













It would make up a fine hotel for tourists to visit this lovely region.







This is the stable.







I wish there still were horses in there. There's actually a whole park with some woods, so tourists could ride the whole thing on horseback for fun.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by JManc

Brittany looks somewhat Britain-y. I wonder who influenced who.

Let's recall that the Bretons are the true Britons. Those who call themselves Britons today are in fact Germanized (and later also Frenchified by their Normand lords) Bretons mixed with Anglo-Saxons (and Jutes).

The Bretons fled Great Britain due to the Anglo-Saxon invasions, so remained "pure Breton", because although they were later Frenchified in the 19th and 20th centuries, there were few admixtures of French people, as Brittany was for a long time a poor part of France so it didn't attract migrants from the rest of France. This has changed in the past 30 years, and Brittany now attracts lots of French people, but it's too short a period to produce a real mixing of populations.

On my visit to Western Brittany (the part of Brittany where the Bretons settlements were the most numerous), I was really surprised to see at the local supermarket how physically different from the rest of France the Bretons look. Lots of red hair, super light and reddish skins, and physical traits you don't see elsewhere in France. Lots of blue eyes too. And much more friendly folks than the rest of French people (which was confirmed to me by some Parisians who settled there 3 years ago). When I say "friendly", for example one day I missed the once-a-day bus to go to the pier from where boats depart to a famous beautiful Breton island, and a local Breton woman in her 50s whom I didn't know took me in her car and drove me 10 miles to the pier so I could catch the boat, despite the fact this wasn't on her itinerary at all. You'd never see that in the rest of France!

[FrAnKs]

Merci pour les photos Mousquet!

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by FrAnKs

Merci pour les photos Mousquet!

De rien. Au fait, il faut que je poste Dinan, parce que c'est vraiment pittoresque.

I was telling Franks Dinan is really a quaint place, like I would like to retire there when I'm old.







15th-century house.







Most buildings in the historic village were built from the 14th to the 18th century.
It remained widely untouched since then.

This 15th-century tower is known as Tour de l'Horloge (clock tower). Even though there would be some line, it is recommended to get in and get to the top.



Inside the tower, this is the apparatus that made the clock work back in the day. It was designed by a German engineer in 1498.



Well, Germany as we know it today didn't exist back then yet, but the engineer was from one of their contemporary landers, so it is fair to credit Germany with it.

Going to the top.



By the top of the tower, the staircase is wooden, which is funny.



There's plenty of bell towers with wooden staircases like this in the country.

Some views from the top.













Of course, you want to walk the alleys of the medieval village.



























Bit of the 13th-century wall that still partly encloses the old village.



Views from a garden along the wall.







Back to the inner village.











We'd parked the car there.



Lol, even parking lots are ok over there.

[montréaliste]

Stunning!

[FrAnKs]

Ça donne envie de visiter la mère patrie!

[mousquet]

Annual visit to Brittany to see some of my relatives who fled over there.
They're happier over there and avoid Paris, sick of it. So it's up to us to visit them.
This time, we stuck to Côtes-d'Armor because family has homes at the seaside over there. It feels like a nice shelter when the rest of the country goes through heatwaves.

Why not playing this mid 90's pop song to it at random? The woman sings that she wants everybody (in particular her man) naked like Adam and Eve, so there would be no more hypocrisy or fake. Must admit it could be funny.

• Video Link

This is Trégastel, a seaside resort on the côte de granite rose (pink granite coast).









There are nice beaches and it's not too crowded in early July yet. The heavy load of toursits shows up from mid July to late August.
Breton water makes me laugh like a little kid, cause you often kinda go - ouch! oh my goodness! when you get in. This is the wide ocean in northern France, no warmer Mediterranean bathtub in the southern country, so it may feel chilly, especially when air temperature is over 30C (86F).

































Pontrieux, a village where there was some kind of contest in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Of course, there was no washing machine back then yet, so locals went like - I'll have the cutest private lavoir (washing place) of the neighborhood for my home!
Hence the 50 little lavoirs along the stream that crosses the village.















This village would've been hit by fires several times in the past centuries, so all old timber-framed houses were devastated.
This is the only spared one that I found.



One of the many medieval mansions that you'll see in the region.
The woman who served us as a guide was both so educated and funny, with a cool sense of humor that I forgot to take more pics.
She kept us 90 minutes inside. To my surprise, time flew and I didn't see it go by, while I stupidly expected to get bored.



The mansion sits on top of a hill with a view on this estuary.



Although it didn't rain a lot lately, it's not a river going dried up. The tide was just low.

Leaving for Bréhat, a small island just a mile or so off the coast.





Getting around the island by boat.





Over there are cormorants, sea birds that are protected by preservation programs. I couldn't shoot them up-close.
Tourism is even banned from some islands in Côtes-d'Armor, to make sure wilder sea birds don't go completely extinct over the area.



Notice the wind farm in a distance. Lots of wind turbines in Brittany.







Flock of tourists getting off the boat.



There's a bit of everything from surrounding countries. Some Dutch, Germans, Italians and British along with the French.
Cars are banned from Bréhat. Some 500 people live in the island all year long. None has a car, but all have boats.
As a tourist, the easiest way to move around the island is to rent a bicycle, that we did. The island is tiny, so you can easily bike it all in a couple of hours à la cool, by taking your time.

Downtown Bréhat, so to speak.



That's a bit of main square in the island. There are restaurants and cafés all around.

Biggest lighthouse on the island.



It looks like this from the boat.





These little pricks are sea birds too, but not so wild. They're like pigeons in Paris, only much bolder. So used to humans that they would come up to you to steal your meal.



They're kinda mean sometimes, but funny, just like birds.




There's a bunch of hamlets like these in the island.





When you're from the big fussy city like myself, it feels so cute and peaceful that you want to buy a boat and your home over there.

This tiny chapel to the right sits on the highest spot of the island.



I'm not quite sure, but I think it is that one to the right as seen from the boat.



Views from up there.







This is a small fort that was built in the 19th century.



Today, it is a glassmaking place.





It was so hot in there, I don't even know how these craftsmen can stand it. They deserve a medal for their resistance to extreme heat.
By the way, where are sunshades?



They must've removed them because it wasn't lunchtime. It was hot in the sunlight.

Getting onboard to get back to mainland.



This is it, thanks for viewing. Hope you enjoy.

[ColDayMan]

Awesome!

[sopas ej]

Very nice set of photos! It looks so relaxing there.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

It looks so relaxing there.

It is, and it is also a place of hardship. The last time I was there, in a rural bus (local service) near that island, a bus that travels like 20 miles along the coast serving various towns, there was a Breton woman in her late 30s-early 40s, not very pretty, a bit plump, who was crying "I've lost my job, what am I going to do now?" And she was crying, and crying, and crying. I've never seen a scene like that anywhere else in France. It felt straight out from the 1930s.