Quimper

Why go

Quimper is Brittany at its most Breton without being a museum piece. Its name, Kemper, means ‘confluence', and the Odet and Steir still slide past flower-hung footbridges in the middle of town. Above the half-timbered streets rise the twin spires of Saint-Corentin, whose nave bends visibly away from its choir. Come for the faience, the excellent museums and the crêpes, and in July for a festival where Breton music fills the streets.

History

A Gallo-Roman town stood at Locmaria, a little downstream on the Odet, where later texts place a Civitas Aquilonia. The medieval city grew at the confluence, around the cathedral of its first bishop, Corentin. Legend says the saint was befriended by Gradlon, king of Cornouaille, who gave him his palace by the river; Gradlon is also the king of the drowned city of Ys in Breton legend, which tells you how far back the story goes.

Quimper became the capital of Cornouaille, one of the historic regions of Brittany, and was long known as Quimper-Corentin. Building of the Gothic cathedral began with the choir around 1239 and went on slowly for centuries and was still under way in the fifteenth, when the west front was begun in 1424 and the transept completed in 1486. During the War of the Breton Succession, Charles de Blois besieged and took the walled town in 1344, with a massacre of its inhabitants.

From the seventeenth century potters at Locmaria developed the tin-glazed faience that made the town famous; English-language sources date the start of the industry to 1690. Its painted figures of Breton men and women became a symbol of the region, and the HB-Henriot faience works still operates in the town.

In the nineteenth century the diocese paid for the cathedral’s long-missing spires through a subscription asking each inhabitant to give a sou a year; they rose between 1854 and 1856. Painters followed the Pont-Aven school to Cornouaille, and Quimper’s fine-arts museum holds many of their works. The town was largely spared during the Second World War, which is why so much of its old centre survives.