Amenities

Rugged cliffs, 600 kms of magnificent beaches and a lush inland landscape are irresistible magnets for those who love France. Add a mild climate, excellent transport links, plus mouth watering local cuisine, and you have the perfect recipe for any location. Enjoy the coast, by all means, but take the opportunity to appreciate the Norman countryside, with its villages, leafy lanes, clear streams, rolling fields and wooded valleys with beech and pine forests.

There is no shortage of interesting and sometimes charming places to visit in Calvados. Its seaside towns are particularly pleasant. Courseulles is a seaside resort and marina with windmills, the châteaux of Fontaine-Henry, Creully, and Brecy, the 11th century church at Thaon and the priory of Saint Gabriel are all nearby.

Further afield, Lisieux has interesting architecture restored after the war, and is becoming a major destination for pilgrims coming to the Basilica of Ste-Therese. Beuvron-en-Auge is classified as one of France’s most beautiful villages, while Beaumont-en-Auge, standing on a high promontory offers a picturesque view up to the seaside, and Bayeaux is a lively market town.

The people of Normandy take their eating very seriously indeed. Norman recipes are usually quite simple, but as they make use of local dairy produce and apples, the fresh natural flavours come through in a vast range of dishes. The sea is as bountiful as the region’s orchards, and the Norman table boasts such specialities as Dieppe sole with Normandy oysters. Fish and seafood are of superior quality in Normandy. Turbot and oysters from the Cotentin Peninsula are major delicacies throughout France. Normandy is the chief oyster-cultivating, scallop-exporting, and mussel-raising region in France. From the delicate flavour of saltmarsh lamb to creamy chicken “à la Vallée d’Auge” and duck “à la Rouennaise”, the excellence of Normandy meat is matched only by that of its cheeses: Neufchâtel, Pont-L’Evêque, Livarot (otherwise known as the “Colonel”), and the round Camembert of Marie Harel, these evocative names are famous world-wide. The creamy omelettes of the Mont Saint Michel, the Vire andouille sausages, tripes cooked “à la mode de Caen”, the “boudin” sausages of Mortagne, and the recent introduction to the region of foie gras, all these delicacies and more entice lovers of good food to the area.

Calvados  is famous for its rolling countryside typified by pasture for dairy cattle and produces a wide range of dairy products.  Norman cheeses  include Camembert, Livarot, Pont l’Evêque, Brillat-Savarin, Neufchâtel, Petit Suisse and Boursin. Normandy butter and Normandy cream are lavishly used in gastronomic specialties. Round off a memorable meal with the local desserts: “bourdelots” or “teurgoule”, or such sweets as Isigny toffees or apple sugars from Rouen. Wash the whole meal down with cider, still or sparkling, dry or sweet, or perry, with an occasional pause for a shot of calvados apple brandy to clear the palate: the famous “trou normand”. The very essence of apples is distilled into calvados, and pommeau. Finally, sit back, savour the moment, and enjoy a glass of Benedictine liqueur or Calvados.

For more than half a century Normandy inspired many paintings. Although Eugène BOUDIN, Nicolas POUSSIN, JF MILLET, Geores SEURAT and Raoul DUFY were not all native Normans, many painters have been seduced by Normandy. It is here they came and here they have left their works to the region : Eugéne ISABEY, VALLOTON, GERNEY, MARQUET, MONET, GERICAULT, FRIESZ, VAN DONGEN, BONINGTON, BRAQUE, JONGKIND.

Romanticism first drew painters to the Channel coasts of Normandy. Richard Parkes Bonington and J. M. W. Turner crossed the Channel from Great Britain, attracted by the light and landscapes. Théodore Géricault, a native of Rouen, was a notable figure in the Romantic movement. The competing Realist tendency was represented by Jean-François Millet, a native of Cotentin.

From the 1860s, plein-air painters, who worked outside the studio, were attracted to Normandy by the ease of railway access from Paris and the development of a market among the growing number of affluent tourists visiting the coasts of Calvados. Eugène Boudin’s paintings of fashionable seaside scenes are typical of this period.

Claude Monet’s water lily garden at Giverny is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the region, and his series of views of Rouen Cathedral are major works of Impressionism. It was “Impression, Sunrise”, a painting by Monet of Le Havre, that led to the movement being dubbed “Impressionism”.

The Société normande de peinture moderne was founded in 1909. Among members were Raoul Dufy, many of whose paintings can be seen at the Rouen Museum, Albert Marquet, Francis Picabia and Maurice Utrillo. Also in this movement were the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp.