Guérande

Why go

Guérande is two landscapes in one. Inside its complete ring of medieval walls is a granite town of lanes, crêperies and a big collegiate church; below it, stretching to the sea, is a flat, shimmering mosaic of salt pans where the work has barely changed in centuries. Walk the ramparts in the morning, cycle the marsh paths in the afternoon, and watch the light go pink over the pans: it is as far from a Paris boulevard as you can imagine.

History

Guérande stands on a granite ridge above the Atlantic, on the southern edge of historic Brittany, and its fortune has always come from what lies below: the salt marshes between the town and the sea, where seawater is led through a maze of clay basins and evaporated by sun and wind. Salt was the great preservative of the pre-industrial world, and Guérande’s was shipped far along the Atlantic coast.

The town is best known in history books for a treaty. In the fourteenth century Brittany was torn by a war of succession between two claimants to the duchy, backed respectively by England and France. After Charles of Blois was killed at the battle of Auray in 1364, the first Treaty of Guérande, signed on 12 April 1365, recognised Jean de Montfort as Duke John IV; a second treaty signed here in 1381 settled his relations with the French king.

The walls were built in the same troubled century, after a ducal order of 1343, and completed and strengthened in the fifteenth. They form an almost unbroken circuit of some 1.3 kilometres, with six towers and four gates, the Porte Saint-Michel being the grandest. Brittany kept its exemption from the royal salt tax, the gabelle, after it joined the French crown, which made Guérande salt a staple of smuggling across the border with neighbouring provinces.

The salt industry nearly died in the twentieth century, undercut by industrial salt from the Mediterranean and from mines. From the 1970s a new generation of paludiers revived it, training newcomers and selling hand-raked salt and fleur de sel under the Guérande name, and the marshes are now a protected landscape and a haven for birds.