Brittany

Brittany is the peninsula that France points at the Atlantic, and it has always looked outward. Its people speak French, but road signs are often bilingual in Breton, a Celtic language related to Welsh and Cornish, and its music, saints and festivals belong to a world that stretches to Ireland and Galicia. The duchy only joined the French crown in 1532. Rennes is the regional capital, Nantes was its historic ducal seat until it was attached to another region in the twentieth century, and Brest, Lorient and Saint-Malo still live by the sea.

The coast is the main event, and it changes every few kilometres: pink granite boulders on the north shore, cliffs and lighthouses at the Pointe du Raz, sheltered rias where oysters grow, and the island-studded Gulf of Morbihan. Inland lies the Argoat, the ‘country of woods', with forests full of Arthurian legend, slate-roofed villages and the parish closes of Finistère, those walled churchyards crowded with carved calvaries.

Thousands of years before any of that, people raised the alignments of Carnac, rows of standing stones that UNESCO added to its list in 2025. For a visitor tired of Paris, Brittany offers weather that changes by the hour, ports where the catch is still landed in the afternoon, long coastal paths and a strong sense of being somewhere with its own identity. It is busy on the coast in August; in May, June or September it feels like yours.

• Pink granite coast of Ploumanac’h
• Cliffs and lighthouses of the Pointe du Raz
• Islands of the Gulf of Morbihan
• Forests and heathland of the Argoat
• Standing-stone alignments of Carnac

Facts

• One of the few regions whose borders were left unchanged by the 2016 territorial reform; it has four departments: Côtes-d’Armor, Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine and Morbihan.
• The Megaliths of Carnac and of the shores of Morbihan were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2025.
• The Duchy of Brittany was united with the Kingdom of France by an edict of 1532.