A week around La Rochelle, before the summer crowds

I just got back from a week around La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast. I went in mid-June on purpose, a few weeks before the place fills up, and that timing pays off almost every time: car parks with space in them, restaurants with free tables, and towns that still belong to the people who live there. In August this coast is crowded. In June I mostly had it to myself.

This one is mostly photos, with a few things I looked up afterwards because they stuck with me.

Two islands, and a lot of bikes

Île de Ré and Île d’Oléron sit just off the coast, each joined to the mainland by a bridge, and they are not the same place at all. Ré is whitewashed, tidy, a little chic. Oléron is bigger and flatter, more working coast than postcard. Both fill with cyclists, which is charming right up until you’re on a narrow lane sharing it with a family wobbling three abreast and a delivery van breathing down your neck. Some of those roads were never built for the traffic they now carry, and it shows.

Oléron’s quiet surprise was the oyster harbour at Le Château-d’Oléron, where the old oyster farmers’ cabins have been repainted in flat blocks of colour and handed over to artists and small shops.

A fort that was useless the day it was finished

The cover photo is Fort Boyard, seen from the water between Aix and Oléron, and it’s a strange, heavy thing to look at even from far off. The idea goes back to Louis XIV, whose engineers decided it simply couldn’t be built on a sandbank in open sea. Napoleon revived the project, and construction then dragged on for half a century. By the time it was done in the 1850s, naval guns could fire clear across the strait the fort was meant to guard, so it was obsolete almost as soon as the last stone went in.

It’s been closed to visitors since 1989, kept alive instead by the French TV game show filmed there, and by the many foreign versions that followed. The regional council now plans to open it to the public again in the summer of 2028. I’d come back for that.

Rochefort is more than the film

Rochefort is known abroad, when it’s known at all, for Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. The town has far more than the film. It grew up around a naval arsenal, and two things from that era earn the stop: the Musée national de la Marine, full of ship models you can read like a timeline of the French navy, hull by hull, and the Corderie Royale, a rope works so long (over 370 metres) it plays tricks on your sense of perspective.

The other landmark spans the river. The transporter bridge over the Charente, opened in 1900, is the last one still working in France: instead of a fixed deck, a gondola hangs from cables and ferries cars and walkers across, leaving the shipping lane clear underneath.

Inland, and much older

I drove inland to Saintes, which a lot of people skip on their way to the beach. That’s a mistake. Its Gallo-Roman amphitheatre, cut into a small valley in the first century, is one of the oldest in Roman Gaul, and on a weekday morning you can walk down into the arena with almost no one else around.

Then, near Plassay, something I didn’t see coming: the Galaxie des Pierres Levées, a field where sculptors are slowly raising hundreds of limestone steles, laid out as a spiral on the golden ratio. It won’t be finished until somewhere around 2060. Standing inside a half-built monument that nobody alive today will see completed is a quietly odd feeling.

None of this is undiscovered. Come August, the island roads clog with traffic and a tour boat circles Fort Boyard every hour. But in June, with long light and empty lanes, the whole coast felt unhurried, and that’s the part I keep chasing. Not the places exactly, but the version of them you only get before everyone else turns up. Where do you go to stay ahead of the season?