The 10 Prettiest Coastal Towns in France To See This Summer and What Makes Each One So Special

I live inland, in the rolling hills of the Charente, but luckily for me, the sea isn’t so far away. The Charente-Maritime, with all its gorgeous coastal towns, is right on my doorstep, so whenever I need a coastal fix within 90 minutes, I’m there.

So often when I talk to people about French coastal towns, the first thing that springs to their minds is the French Riviera or Brittany, and granted, both are stunning. However, there is so much more to see if you only knew about them. It’s a bit like thinking Paris is France. 

What I love most is that behind every pretty harbor, there’s usually a siege, a shipwreck, a saint, or a painter. All those fabulous stories that make these places even more special, as if they needed it.

10 Beautiful Coastal Towns in France to Visit This Summer

As I put this list together, I’ve worked my way right around the coastline from my own corner to the Italian border. A couple you’ll know, but most you might not. All of them are worth the detour, and every single one has a tale to tell.

Royan, the Town That Rose From the Ashes

Let’s start close to home. Royan sits at the mouth of the Gironde estuary, and before the war, Royan was a glittering Belle Époque resort, all grand villas and sea baths, where the bourgeois families of Bordeaux loved to come. 

Then, in January 1945, with the war all but won elsewhere, the Allies bombed it to dust to flush out a pocket of German troops dug in at the estuary. Around 85 percent of the town was flattened. Hardly anything was left.

Rather than rebuild the old town, the planners turned Royan into a blank canvas for the architects of the 1950s. They poured it back to life in white concrete, with sweeping curves borrowed from Brazilian modernism, and crowned it with the soaring concrete church of Notre-Dame. It’s the most bizarre church I’ve ever seen, and I couldn’t help thinking how much it looked like a multi-story car park.

It’s now listed as a Town of Art and History, and a place people travel to just to see the architecture. A town bombed flat and reborn as something nobody had seen before. I find that rather wonderful.

La Rochelle, the Old Rebel of the Atlantic

Just up the coast is La Rochelle, and if Royan wears its history on the outside, La Rochelle keeps hers tucked behind three medieval towers.

Those towers still guard the old port, exactly as they have since the 14th century. Walk between them, and you’re following in the wake of the Knights Templar, who ran their biggest Atlantic base from here, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who granted the town its freedoms back in the 12th century. 

La Rochelle has always had an independent, slightly rebellious streak, something I love about it.

That streak nearly finished her. As a Protestant stronghold, the city defied the crown one too many times, and in 1627, Cardinal Richelieu laid siege to it. 

He threw a great sea wall across the harbor mouth to starve the place out, and it worked. After 14 brutal months, a city of more than twenty thousand had been reduced to around five thousand survivors. 

Today you’d never guess at all that as you sit on the quayside with a coffee, watching the boats, but it’s all there in the stone. 

Honfleur, the Harbor That Invented a Whole Art Movement

Now we head north to Normandy, and to a harbor you may already recognize, even if you’ve never been.

Honfleur sits where the Seine meets the sea, and its Vieux Bassin, the old harbor, is ringed with tall, narrow houses clad in slate, their reflections wobbling in the water. Those skinny houses came about because land was so dear that families built upward instead of outward. The effect, though, is pure magic, and it has been catching painters’ eyes for nearly two hundred years.

Honfleur’s own son, Eugène Boudin, was one of the first French painters to take his easel outdoors and paint the sea and sky as he found them. He took a young lad called Claude Monet under his wing, and the pair of them, along with a few friends, more or less lit the fuse on Impressionism right here. 

Don’t miss the church of Sainte-Catherine while you’re there. It’s the largest wooden church in France, built by shipwrights who knew boats better than buildings, so the ceiling looks just like an upturned hull. Honfleur is a lovely spot to explore on foot, with no need for a car once you arrive.

Saint-Malo, the Walled City of Pirates

Round into Brittany now, and to my mind, one of the most dramatic walled towns in all of France. Saint-Malo rises straight out of the sea behind thick granite ramparts, with the tide crashing at its feet.

For centuries, this was the city of the corsairs, and don’t you dare call them pirates. Corsairs were privateers, licensed by the king to plunder enemy ships, and they made Saint-Malo fabulously rich. Their grand stone mansions still stand inside the walls. 

Names like Surcouf and Duguay-Trouin are local legends, and it was from here that Jacques Cartier set sail in 1534 and claimed Canada for France.

The town you see today is almost a miracle. In August 1944, the battle to free Saint-Malo destroyed around 80 percent of the old walled city. But instead of bulldozing the ruins and starting fresh, the townspeople rebuilt it as it was, numbering the fallen stones like the pieces of a giant puzzle and putting them back where they belonged. 

Wander the ramparts now, and you’d swear nothing had ever touched it. There’s much more in my full guide to Brittany if this stretch of coast calls to you.

Camaret-sur-Mer, the Sleepy Port With a Boat Graveyard

Staying in Brittany, but swapping the crowds of Saint-Malo for somewhere far quieter and stranger. Camaret-sur-Mer sits right out on the wild tip of the Crozon peninsula, about as far west as you can go.

Once upon a time, this was the biggest crayfish port in France, and the harbor bustled with boats. Those days are long gone, and the most haunting sight here is the cimetière à bateaux, the boat graveyard, where the wooden hulls of old fishing vessels have been left to rot along the shingle. At sunset, their silhouettes lean against the sky like something from a dream.

Guarding the harbor is the ochre-colored Vauban tower, built in the 1690s and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Add the 100-meter cliffs nearby and a field of Neolithic standing stones just up the road, and you’ve got a town that has a lot to offer.

Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Where a Wedding Sealed a Peace

Down now to the very southwest, almost on the Spanish border, to the Basque town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. This is a place of red-and-white shuttered houses, a curved sandy bay, and a fishing port that has been working for centuries.

Like Saint-Malo, it grew wealthy on Basque corsairs in the 17th century, its golden age. But its proudest day came on the 9th of June 1660, when the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste hosted the wedding of the young Louis XIV to Maria Theresa of Spain. 

This was no love match. It was the human seal on the Treaty of the Pyrenees, ending a long and bitter war between France and Spain. Legend has it that the door the couple walked through was bricked up afterward, so no one could ever follow in their footsteps.

You can still visit the house where the Sun King stayed, and pick up a box of macarons from Maison Adam, the very same bakery that made them for the royal court. The plain church exterior hides a breathtaking golden Baroque interior. Do step inside.

Collioure, the Town That Set Painting on Fire

Now for the Mediterranean, and a little Catalan port so close to Spain you can almost touch it. Collioure tumbles down to a sheltered bay in a riot of color, watched over by a royal castle and a pink-domed bell tower that rises straight out of the water.

In the summer of 1905, a broke and downhearted Henri Matisse came here looking for answers and found them in Collioure’s dazzling light. He fired off a postcard to his friend André Derain that simply said: “Come!” And Derain came. 

Together they painted the town in wild, unnatural, joyous color and, in doing so, invented Fauvism, the movement that blew the doors off modern art. You can follow a trail through the streets today with copies of their paintings propped up exactly where the originals were painted.

There’s a deeper history, too. The 13th-century Château Royal was begun by the Knights Templar and later strengthened by the great military engineer Vauban. And the town has been salting anchovies for so many hundreds of years that two traditional salting houses still carry on the craft. Color, art, castles, and little salted fish. What’s not to love?

Cassis, the Quiet Jewel Beneath the Cliffs

Further along the Mediterranean coast, tucked beneath the towering cliffs of Cap Canaille and the white limestone of the Calanques, sits Cassis. It’s only half an hour from Marseille, but it feels like another world entirely.

This was a humble fishing village for most of its life, trading across the Mediterranean. Then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, its stone quarries took off, and the creamy-white “Pierre de Cassis” was shipped around the world. It even helped build parts of the Suez Canal and the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York. Not bad for a little harbor town.

Raoul Dufy painted here, and Churchill is said to have brought his brushes. These days, people come for the Calanques, those steep limestone inlets filled with impossibly turquoise water, which you can reach on foot, by kayak, or by boat. 

Bormes-les-Mimosas, the Village Dressed in Flowers

A little along the Var coast is the prettiest name on this whole list, and the village lives up to every syllable of it. Bormes-les-Mimosas, in the south of France, spills down a hillside above the sea in a cascade of ochre houses, ruined castle walls, and steep little stepped streets.

It started life as a fortified medieval hilltop village, built high up to keep watch for the pirates who once raided this coast. But what makes it special now is the flowers. More than seven hundred species grow here, draping the stone walls in bougainvillea, jasmine, and geraniums.

And then there’s the mimosa, the fluffy golden bloom that arrived from Australia in the 19th century and took over so completely that the village added “les Mimosas” to its name in 1968. Every February, when the mimosa flowers, the whole place celebrates with a festival and a parade of flower-covered floats.

Menton, the Pearl on the Italian Border

And so we reach the very end of the French coast, the last town before Italy. Menton is sometimes called the Pearl of France, and it’s an irresistible mix of Mediterranean color and Italian flavor, its old town stacked up the hillside in shades of apricot, peach, and rose.

For centuries, Menton belonged to the Grimaldi family of Monaco, and it only voted to join France in 1861. Before that, it had spent years flip-flopping back and forth across the border. 

In 1848, it even broke away from Monaco in a row over taxes, and the tax in question was on lemons. That’s how important the local citrus was, and still is. By the Belle Époque, Menton had become a winter darling of Europe’s elite. Even Queen Victoria came to take the gentle air.

Those lemons are now the stuff of legend, thanks to the Fête du Citron, the Lemon Festival held every February since the 1930s, where enormous sculptures are built entirely from citrus fruit.

So, Which Coastal Town Will You Choose?

There you have it. Ten of the prettiest coastal towns in France, from the Atlantic estuaries to the Italian frontier.

Half the joy of a coastal town is the food pulled straight from the water that morning, eaten at a harborside table with the right local wine. Wherever you go, seek out the local market, order the catch of the day, and finish with whichever famous regional cheese or classic French dessert the area is known for.

À bientôt, et bon voyage!