Brittany

Brittany faces the Atlantic with strength and mystery. Granite coasts, fishing ports, Celtic traditions, tides and maritime weather create a region whose beauty is dramatic, elemental and unmistakably its own.

Brittany is the great western peninsula of France, an independent duchy until 1532 and still distinct in language, music and outlook. Its coastline runs for more than two thousand kilometres, from the pink granite of the Côte de Granit Rose to the cliffs of Finistère and the islands of the Gulf of Morbihan, where megaliths at Carnac stand in rows older than the pyramids.

On the north coast, the Emerald Coast gathers its most celebrated towns: Saint-Malo, the walled port of corsairs and explorers; Dinard, the Belle Époque resort across the Rance; and Cancale, whose oyster beds have supplied Paris for centuries. The cuisine is maritime and buttery — shellfish, buckwheat galettes, salted caramel and cider.

The Breton climate is temperate and changeable, never truly hot and rarely cold. June and September are the most rewarding months, with long light, quieter beaches and sea temperatures at their best late in the summer. July and August belong to the festivals: the Vieilles Charrues at Carhaix in July and the Festival Interceltique de Lorient in August, which draws pipers and dancers from across the Celtic world.

The spring and autumn equinoxes bring the great tides, when the sea withdraws for kilometres around Cancale and the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. Every four years in November, Saint-Malo sends the Route du Rhum single-handed race across the Atlantic to Guadeloupe. Winter storms on the Finistère coast have their own followers.

The finest addresses face the sea. Castelbrac, a nineteenth-century building restored as a hotel, stands on the Dinard shore looking across to Saint-Malo; Le Grand Hôtel des Thermes in Saint-Malo pairs its Sillon beachfront with a seawater spa; Domaine de Rochevilaine occupies its own rocky point at Billiers on the southern coast. Les Maisons de Bricourt, the houses of the Roellinger family, look over the Bay of Cancale and its oyster beds.

Each is an independent house, and LVXVRY advises on and arranges the stay directly with the hotel. The north-coast addresses combine naturally into a single route along the Emerald Coast, from the ramparts of Saint-Malo to the oyster beds of Cancale, with Mont-Saint-Michel within an hour; Rochevilaine suits a separate stay among the islands and megaliths of the south.