Adventure Is Calling in Brittany — A Journey for Adventurers

Crêpes and cidre, salted caramel, striped shirts, and even the native spirit known as the korrigan. Brittany, in northwestern France, has an identity so distinct that it feels like a country of its own. From the 10th century to the mid-16th century, it was in fact an independent state, the Duchy of Brittany. Its position on the periphery was one reason the region built its own sense of purpose. Living alongside a rugged landscape of rocky coasts and wetlands, the Bretons have long called themselves Bretons and, throughout history, have kept innovating and seeking adventure. Today they carry on their heritage without hesitating to change. Their original energy can still be found everywhere: in the alleys of Nantes, where contemporary art appears in unexpected places, and in the bold waves of Saint-Malo.

Generally, Brittany refers not only to today’s Région Brittany, with Rennes as its capital, but to the whole territory of the old Duchy of Brittany. That includes Nantes, which administratively belongs to Pays de la Loire but remains Brittany’s cultural center. Starting from Nantes, the city of Jules Verne, travel through Brière Regional Natural Park and Rennes to Saint-Malo, and draw inspiration for your own adventure. Both trains and rental cars work well.

Words Lee Kiseon
Photos Ko Ara
In collaboration with Atout France

Nantes
Nantes

In downtown Nantes, you can easily spot a green line painted on the sidewalks. It is La Ligne Verte, or the Green Line, a route linking the city’s main sights. Twelve kilometers long in total, it passes the Château des Ducs de Brittany, a castle whose history goes back to the 13th century, along with the contemporary art museum, the train station, and installations scattered through the city’s streets. The Green Line is one example of the new identity of Nantes, the sixth-largest city in France. After rapidly rebuilding its downtown, destroyed in World War II, the city found a breakthrough in urban regeneration when shipbuilding and manufacturing declined in the 1980s.

Naturally, the Green Line also takes in Les Machines de l’Île, the signature attraction of the Île de Nantes. The project, whose name means “the machines of the island,” brings to life machines imagined by Nantes-born science fiction writer Jules Verne and by Leonardo da Vinci. It is a collaboration between the city of Nantes and the performance company La Machine. The project’s mascot, the mechanical elephant Grand Éléphant, sets out on its stroll in the dazzling sunshine. It plants its massive feet with care and sprays water from its flexibly curling trunk. Modeled on the elephant-shaped steam locomotive in Verne’s novel “The Steam House,” the Grand Éléphant stands 8 meters tall and weighs 48.4 tons. Beneath its skin of iron and wood, instead of internal organs, it carries an eco-friendly hybrid motor, a battery, 62 cylinders, and a lounge that holds up to 50 passengers.

After leading a crowd of onlookers around for 30 minutes, the Grand Éléphant finishes its parade and returns to its home at La Galerie des Machines. A giant mechanical workshop and gallery set in a former warehouse, it lets visitors follow the Les Machines de l’Île project in real time. Beyond exhibitions of machine sketches, you can even ride newly built mechanical animals and insects. Under the exhibition hall’s high ceiling, a mechanical heron with an 8-meter wingspan flaps its wings, carrying passengers who gape in wonder, while a mechanical ant stirs among the lush foliage. By 2022, these mechanical creatures will take up residence in L’Arbre aux Hérons, a mechanical tree 36 meters tall. Even now, though, you can become a character in a Verne novel. On the Carrousel des Mondes Marins, a three-story carousel that recreates the deep-sea world of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas,” you can climb onto the back of a monstrous fish.

Saint-Nazaire
St-Nazaire

The Loire, France’s longest river, flows down through the Val de Loire past the legendary châteaux where Leonardo da Vinci once walked. By the time it reaches Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, it meets an entirely different landscape. That landscape is Estuaire, an art trail stretching more than 60 kilometers along the river. Its name literally means “estuary,” and it turns the entire river basin from Nantes to Saint-Nazaire into an exhibition space. You can explore Estuaire by car, on foot, by bike, or by cruise, using as markers some 30 installations, sculptures, and architectural works by artists from around the world.

The Estuaire pilgrimage begins right on the Île de Nantes. As you take in the Nantes riverfront through the 18 aluminum rings of the installation “Les Anneaux” on the island’s western bank, a ghostly white tree, “Lunar Tree,” comes into view on the rocks across the water. In a village near Nantes, you see a bleak vision of the future caused by global warming: a three-story house, “La Maison dans la Loire,” partly submerged in the river. On the beach in front of Le pont de Saint-Nazaire, a bridge 3,356 meters long, you can encounter the aluminum skeleton of a giant sea serpent that seems to have fallen asleep here after crossing the Atlantic. It is “Serpent d’Océan,” by a Chinese installation artist.

To see the last work of Estuaire, cross the Saint-Nazaire bridge and head to Chantiers de l’Atlantique, Saint-Nazaire’s shipyard, the largest in France. Take the elevator up from the concrete bunker where Espadon, the first French submarine to explore beyond the Arctic Circle, is moored, and go to the Terrasse Panoramique on the roof. The work “Suite de Triangles Saint-Nazaire,” which uses an optical illusion, can be seen only from a specific spot marked on the roof. Only from there do the red shapes painted on the roofs and walls of the vast shipyard facilities spread out in every direction come together to form several giant triangles.

Brière Regional Natural Park
Parc Naturel Régional de Brière

“That’s a heron! Along with the stork, it’s the bird you see most in the marsh. I’ll tell you if a bluethroat shows up. They’re quite hard to spot.” Our guide, Damien, says this while diligently scanning in every direction. A flock of ducks swims leisurely at our eye level. In a wide meadow, a few geese hurry off somewhere, while a herd of dappled horses stands lost in meditation. This is the scenery you can see to your heart’s content from a chaland, a flat-bottomed barge, in Brière Regional Natural Park. With its flat bottom, this traditional boat sails close to the surface of the water. It is the only way to explore the park’s wetlands, and it lets passengers adapt to the rhythm of the marsh. Grande Brière, France’s second-largest wetland, is part of the park, which covers more than 40,000 hectares north of the Loire estuary. Migratory birds traveling between northern Europe and Africa stop here to rest every year. The reed beds that cover half of the marsh are home to many species, including tits, bitterns, sandpipers, and field mice.

Grande Brière is also home to the local people, the Brièrons. As early as the 15th century, the Duke of Brittany declared the Brière marshes the common property of the local people. The Brièrons made their living from livestock, fishing, and hunting, along with harvesting peat. After industrialization in the 19th century reduced peat cutting, tourism took its place. Today, 21 communes bordering Brière, including Saint-Nazaire, the medieval city of Guérande, and the well-known resort of La Baule-Escoublac, jointly own and manage the wetland area known as Grande Brière Mottière.

In Brière, you can enjoy not only boat tours but also birdwatching, horseback riding, and fishing. The ecological value of a Ramsar wetland and the region’s distinctive culture are what make Brière appealing. Brièrons like our guide Damien still pole their barges, and thousands of traditional houses with thatched roofs remain in the area. To quote the 20th-century writer Alphonse de Chateaubriant, you can still glimpse “a fierce love for the soil of Brière, an intense tenacity built on the inviolable solidarity among Brièrons from the same village.”

Rennes
Rennes

Old-time jazz drifts from a tinny speaker set at one edge of the square, and families and friends laugh and dance. It is a Saturday morning, amid colorful flower stalls and open-air cafés. Marché des Lices, the second-largest market in France, has been running Rennes’s Saturday mornings for more than 400 years. Centered on Place des Lices, just west of the Parliament of Brittany building that symbolizes the old town, some 300 stalls selling flowers, fruit, vegetables, coffee, and more pack several blocks. In Halles Martenot, a stately indoor market built in the 19th century, the meat and seafood vendors are busy serving customers.

Food is a great way to explore Rennes’s old town, where old and new blend together. After Marché des Lices, a good next stop is Crêperie la Motte Picquet, in front of Cathedral Saint-Pierre nearby. For more than 50 years it has been making galettes (savory buckwheat crêpes) and crêpes the traditional way, and you can eat them as a full multicourse meal, accompanied by local cider. About a 15-minute walk from there, the craft pub Maloan canned craft beers from across Europe on the spot. On a street lined with traditional half-timbered houses, you can sample original brews or take them to go. If you want to learn more about local craft beer, stop by the beer shop Chez Alain, just one block away. Its young owner, Alain, is an avid beer lover who carefully selects hundreds of beers from Brittany and around the world and offers friendly advice, so you are unlikely to go wrong. Two blocks farther on, Durand Chocolatier also awakens a sense of taste adventure. In a workshop that once belonged to a 19th-century sculptor, chocolatiers create inventive chocolates from cacao grown on small farms in Africa and South America. Think of chocolates made with saffron harvested in Rennes and buckwheat honey, chocolates infused with Breton seaweed, or chocolates served sprinkled with Guérande fleur de sel.

Saint-Malo
St-Malo

Walk to the end of Grande Plage du Sillon, the longest beach in Saint-Malo, and you reach the ramparts. At Plage de Bon-Secours, on the north side of the 1.8-kilometer wall that encircles the old town, a nostalgic scene unfolds that can be found only in Saint-Malo: a golden beach dotted with sunbathers, and beyond it a seawater swimming pool and the île du Grand-Bé. This small granite island is the resting place of René de Chateaubriand, the 18th-century writer and politician born in Saint-Malo. You can walk to it at low tide, but at high tide it becomes an island again. It is a warning visitors hear over and over in Saint-Malo.

What truly governs the environment of Saint-Malo is the tide. The tidal range here reaches up to 13 meters, and the highest tides come between March and September each year. The world’s first large-scale tidal power plant was built here in 1967. At high tide, not only does the golden beach before your eyes disappear beneath the sea, but you may also get soaked by a wave while walking back to your hotel along the seaside promenade.

Saint-Malo appeared as the setting for a romantic story in Éric Rohmer’s 1996 film ‘A Summer’s Tale,’ but it is a place better suited to action. Even within Brittany, Saint-Malo’s independent spirit stands out; from 1590 to 1593 it went so far as to declare itself an independent republic. Even now, the Saint-Malo flag, combining red and blue, flies over the Château de Saint-Malo, above the French and Breton flags. In the 16th and 17th centuries, privateers who ruled the English Channel won fame (or notoriety) here, and Saint-Malo produced many well-known explorers and pirates. Among them were Jacques Cartier, the adventurer who was the first European to sail to Canada, and Robert Surcouf, who made his name in the Indian Ocean.

So to experience the essence of Saint-Malo, take a boat tour. It departs from the port of Saint-Malo in front of the ramparts, passes the tidal power plant at the mouth of the Rance River, and continues to neighboring resort town Dinard, lined with English-style villas. From there it goes past a 19th-century lighthouse that looks as if it wears a red cap, then returns to Fort du Petit Bé, a 17th-century fortress floating off the ramparts of Saint-Malo, and the île du Grand-Bé. The ruined island forts scattered across the glittering sea remind you throughout that this is Saint-Malo, where tales of fierce battles and adventure have now become romance.