Honfleur

Why go

The Seine that flows past the Louvre ends here, in a harbour so pretty it looks staged. But Honfleur earns it: the tall, narrow houses around the Vieux Bassin were built by a working port, the wooden church was raised by ship’s carpenters, and the light over the estuary changed French painting. Come for the sky as much as the stones, walk up to the Côte de Grâce for the view of the estuary, and stay until the day-trippers leave.

History

Honfleur grew up as a fortified port on the south bank of the Seine estuary, guarding the river route to Rouen and Paris. That made it a prize in the Hundred Years’ War: the English took it in the 1350s and held it again from 1419 until a French army retook it in February 1450, after a siege of more than a month.

Peace brought wealth and a new church. Tradition holds that the local shipwrights, short of stone and masons but rich in timber skills, built Sainte-Catherine in wood in the second half of the fifteenth century, with its bell tower standing apart across the square. From this harbour sailors went far: Jehan Denis reached Newfoundland in 1506, and Samuel de Champlain made several voyages from Honfleur, including the one that led to the founding of Quebec in 1608.

In the 1660s Colbert had part of the fortifications pulled down so that the harbour could grow; under Abraham Duquesne the inner port was turned into the wet dock now called the Vieux Bassin, finished in 1684. The houses that crowd its quays, slate-hung and up to seven storeys tall on one side, date from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Of the old walls only the Lieutenance, the former Caen gate, survives.

As Le Havre across the water took the big trade, Honfleur found another calling. Eugène Boudin, born here in 1824, painted the estuary skies, and in the 1850s and 1860s he, Courbet, Jongkind and the young Monet gathered at the Saint-Siméon farm above the town. The composer Erik Satie was born here in 1866, in the same street as the humorist Alphonse Allais.