Brittany was the first place in France where I had to plan my days around the moon.
Not the weather. The moon. I checked a tide table every single morning for fourteen days the way you’d check a forecast, because here it decides what you can actually do.
Whether an island is an island, whether a beach exists, whether the photograph you drove an hour for is even possible today.
That’s the first thing that makes this region hard to plan.
The second is its size.
The good things in Brittany are spread across a peninsula roughly the size of Belgium, and the distance between the two coasts is enough to eat a whole day of a short trip.
It’s very easy to look at a map, want all of it, and end up driving through most of your holiday.
So I’ve written this Brittany travel guide as the thing I wish I’d had before I booked: how the region divides, which part to choose if you only have a week, where to base yourself, and which planning mistakes actually cost you something.
One thing upfront. I spent fourteen days here, across the north coast and the south. I reached the eastern edge of Finistère at Doëlan and Le Pouldu on my last day, but I did not see the west of it. This means no Crozon, no Pointe du Raz, no Quimper or Concarneau. I’ll tell you what I know about that corner further down, and I’ll be clear that it’s secondhand.
I’m Ersilia – architect and travel lover
📍 Based in Toulouse, I’ve been uncovering castles, villages & hidden gems for years — and I share the ones I truly love.
✨ Get my Paris Restaurants Map 🍷🥖
✨ Plus, download my Free Guide to the Loire Valley, Dordogne & Provence — with the best castles, villages, and slow travel tips I recommend
Want me to plan your trip? Details here
If you only have a week, read this part
Do not try to see all of Brittany in seven days.
You can drive it, but you’ll spend two of those days in the car and arrive everywhere at the wrong time of day.
Pick one coast and go deeper. Brittany rewards that far more than it rewards mileage.
Choose the north if
Travel to the North of Birttany if you want medieval towns and walled cities, the most dramatic rock landscapes in the region, and a lot of variety within short drives.
This is the photographer’s coast. It has pink granite boulders, ramparts, timber-framed streets, tides that redraw the shoreline twice a day.
It’s also the more historical half, and the easiest if you like a full day of sightseeing rather than a slow one.
The trade-off: colder water, busier headline sights, and more driving between places. And rain, rain is a part of it, even in July or August.
Choose the south if
On the other hand, the South of Brittany is for you if you want islands, beaches, boat days and a gentler pace.
The Morbihan is somewhere you settle into rather than tour — one ferry, one island, a nice restaurant.
The weather is milder, the coastline softer, and there are prehistoric sites and good markets.
This is also the better half if you’re travelling with children, or if your idea of a holiday involves reading on sand for an afternoon.
The trade-off: fewer knockout towns, and the famous cycling on the Quiberon peninsula is not what it’s advertised to be.
Two weeks gets you both coasts, which is what I did. Three weeks gets you Finistère as well, which is the trip I’d plan next.
The version I’d warn against is ten days. It’s long enough to be tempted by everything and not long enough to do it.
Brittany at a glance
| Where | The peninsula at France’s north-west corner |
| First-timer, one week | One coast only. North for towns and drama, south for islands |
| Car | Yes on the mainland, no on the islands |
| Best months | Late June and early September. July and August are busy |
| The thing that runs everything | The tide |
| Biggest surprise | Air conditioning barely exists here |
| Best night of my trip | A village night market, and it cost nothing |
How Brittany actually breaks up
The Emerald Coast (north-east)
Here you’ll find walled cities, enormous tides, medieval towns just inland.
This is Saint-Malo, Dinard across the water, Dinan up its hill, and the run west along the cliffs to Fort la Latte and Cap d’Erquy.
It has the highest density of things worth seeing of anywhere I went, and it’s where I’d send a first-timer with limited time.
Start planning a trip to the Emerald Coast with these guides:
A note on Mont-Saint-Michel: it is not in Brittany. It’s in Normandy, over the regional border, and it belongs to a different history than the one you’ll be travelling through here.
It happens to sit forty-five minutes from Saint-Malo, so most people fold it into a Brittany trip and you reasonably can — but come to Brittany for Brittany. If you’ve got seven days, don’t let one Norman abbey take a day and a half of them. Here’s how to do it as a day trip if you decide to.
The Pink Granite Coast (north)
Stranger, wilder, and much less visited.
Around Ploumanac’h the coastline turns into enormous rose-coloured boulders piled on each other, with a coastal path threading right through them.
Offshore, the Sept-Îles archipelago holds thousands of seabirds — we sailed out on a grey afternoon and I nearly cried at the sight of them.
Further east, the Île de Bréhat, Paimpol and the Abbaye de Beauport.
This was my favourite stretch in Brittany for landscape, and the one I’d go back to first.
Start planning a trip to Pink Granite Coast with these guides:
The Morbihan and the south coast
Islands, standing stones, and a softer climate.
Belle-Île-en-Mer is the highlight and deserves three days on its own.
The Gulf of Morbihan is a near-enclosed bay scattered with islands you reach by boat.
Vannes has a beautiful old town, Carnac has thousands of prehistoric stones, and Quiberon is the peninsula everyone photographs from.
Start planning a trip to The Morbihan with these guides:
Finistère — the part I haven’t done
Finistère means “the end of the earth,” and by every account I’ve been given, it earns the name.
I only reached its eastern edge, on my final day, at Doëlan and Le Pouldu — a small working harbour and a beach my husband knew from a few months he spent there as a student. Lovely, and nothing like the wild western end that people mean when they say Finistère.
So here’s what I have secondhand, from French colleagues who holiday there every year and from my husband, who knows it far better than I do.
They talk about the Crozon peninsula the way I’ve heard people talk about the west of Ireland — cliffs, empty beaches, weather that turns four times a day.
About the Pointe du Raz as the genuine end of the land. About Quimper and Locronan for old Breton towns, Concarneau for its walled port, and Pont-Aven for the painters who went there.
Every one of them insists it’s the most beautiful part of Brittany, and that it needs its own week rather than being tacked onto a coastal trip.
I believe them, and I’m going back for it. Until I’ve stood there myself I’m not going to write you a guide to it, because the whole point of this site is that I’ve been where I’m sending you.
Where to base yourself
Four bases in fourteen days was the best decision I made, and here’s the concrete reason.
Everything I wanted to see from each base was within forty-five minutes of it. Dinard is twenty minutes by boat, Dinan thirty by car, from Saint-Malo for example.
That meant four consecutive days of leaving in the morning and coming back to the same room, the same wardrobe and the same restaurant street at night — and walking the ramparts before breakfast because it took four minutes to get there.
The alternative, which I watched other people doing, is checking out every morning. You lose an hour to packing, an hour to finding the next car park, and you arrive at each new town at midday, which is the worst hour of the day in every single place on this list.
For the exact hotels and where I stayed in each base, check out my 14 days itinerary where I describe each place.
| Base | Nights | Covers |
| Saint-Malo | 4 | Dinard, Dinan, the Emerald Coast |
| Perros-Guirec | 3 | Pink Granite Coast, Sept-Îles, Bréhat, Paimpol |
| Belle-Île | 3 | The island itself, which needs all three |
| Vannes | 4 | Gulf of Morbihan, Carnac, Quiberon, the south |
Getting to Brittany, and getting around
By air: Rennes for the north, Nantes for the south, Brest for Finistère.
By train: the TGV from Paris reaches Rennes in around ninety minutes, with onward connections. Booking early makes an enormous difference to the price — my tips for taking the train in France covers how the fare system actually works.
By car: what we did, and what I’d recommend for the coast. The trailheads, abbeys and viewpoints between towns are difficult to reach otherwise. If you need to rent a car, compare prices via DiscoverCars, it’s the best way to find the best deal.
A car-free Brittany is possible if you stick to Saint-Malo, Dinard, Dinan and Vannes — all reachable by train or boat — but you’ll miss most of the coastal paths.
Three decisions that saved us real money
Leave the car on the mainland for the islands. Taking ours to Belle-Île would have cost around €250. Two foot passengers cost around €60. We went on foot, hired a small electric car on the island for one day at €133, saw everything, and still came out well ahead.
Take the boat to Dinard, not the car. The shuttle from Saint-Malo is fifteen to twenty minutes and runs constantly. Driving round the estuary is forty-five minutes plus finding a parking space in August, which is its own misery. This one saves you time rather than money, and time is the scarcer thing.
Bring your own breakfast to Mont-Saint-Michel. We didn’t, arrived before anything opened, and ended up paying €10 each for a coffee and a pastry in a hotel because there was no alternative.
When to visit Brittany
We came in July, over the 14th July weekend, which is one of the busiest periods in the French calendar. Saint-Malo coped well. Belle-Île’s beaches were fine until early afternoon.
Late June or early September would give you the same light with noticeably fewer people, and I’d choose those if I could.
The weather is changeable in every month. Sun in the morning means nothing here. You carry a rain jacket in August and you use it.
The tide, and why it matters more than the weather
At Saint-Malo the difference between high and low water changes which beaches exist and whether you can walk out to the islands.
On Bréhat, I deliberately went in the afternoon to dodge the morning crowds and arrived at dead low tide — which meant the blue channels I’d come specifically to photograph simply weren’t there.
That one was my own fault, and it’s the mistake I’d most like to save you from. I’d followed good advice about crowds and completely forgotten to check the other variable.
Check the tide table on your first morning and again every morning after. Where a boat boards, whether a beach appears, whether a causeway is walkable — all of it moves.
What to eat and drink
Galettes are the savoury ones, made with buckwheat; crêpes are sweet. The best crêpe of my fourteen days came from a simple place in a small square in Saint-Malo, not from anywhere expensive — which was true of almost every good meal we had here.
Cider comes in bowls, not glasses. Try the pear one. I didn’t know it existed.
Seafood, everywhere. Erquy is Brittany’s leading scallop port. In La Trinité-sur-Mer we ate at a place that looks like a school canteen from 1985 and served the best-value shellfish of the trip.
Local cheese. At the Abbaye de Beauport there’s a small café serving cheese from a producer five kilometres away, and it was one of the nicest simple meals we had.
Kouign-amann, the famous butter-and-sugar cake. Everyone here will tell you it’s the greatest dessert ever made. I tried the best one in Saint-Malo and was thoroughly disappointed, which I explain in the Saint-Malo post. You may well disagree with me.
Go to a night market
In summer, villages across Brittany run marchés de nuit — local makers, local food, live music, and they end in a group dance that everybody joins.
We went to one near Vannes, watched people in traditional dress, and danced badly with them. It was the best night of the entire trip and it cost nothing. Ask locally where the nearest one is that week; they move around.
What Brittany costs
Mid-range overall, with two costs that catch people out.
Parking in walled towns. We paid around €120 for four days at Saint-Malo, because no hotel inside the walls has parking. Factor that in before you compare hotel prices between areas, or you’ll compare them wrongly.
Ferries with a car, as above.
Otherwise restaurants are reasonable, crêperies are cheap, and the best things here — coastal paths, ramparts, beaches, night markets — are free.
Things nobody warned me about
Air conditioning barely exists. Breton buildings were made for a cooler climate than the one France now has. We went eleven nights before we found a room with AC, and slept badly for most of them. If it matters to you, filter for it specifically and expect a shorter list.
Shops close at lunch, and close early. Roughly midday to two or three, then early in the evening. We missed the galleries in Paimpol entirely because of it — we’d walked around the harbour, decided to buy a painting after lunch, and came back to shutters.
The beaches often have nothing. On Belle-Île there are no toilets, bins or kiosks at any beach I found. That’s precisely why they look the way they do — but bring water, food and a bag for your rubbish.
Wear proper shoes. I lost count of the people attempting hundreds of medieval steps in flip-flops.
Brittany has hydrangeas the way Provence has lavender. There are fields of them near Paimpol, with the sea behind. Nobody had told me that either.
Frequently asked questions
Is Brittany worth visiting?
Yes, and it surprised me — I expected a nice coastline and got a region with its own language, food and rhythms that feels genuinely distinct from the rest of France. The scenery on the Pink Granite Coast and Belle-Île is as good as anywhere I’ve been in the country.
Is Brittany expensive?
Mid-range. Food is good value and the best experiences are free. The two things that cost more than you’d expect are parking in the walled towns and taking a car onto the islands.
Do you need to speak French in Brittany?
It helps more than in Paris or the Riviera. Some tours run in French only — the corsair house in Saint-Malo is one — and outside the main towns English is less common. These apps cover translation along with the tide and transport tools you’ll want.
Is Mont-Saint-Michel in Brittany?
No. It’s in Normandy. It sits close to the border and forty-five minutes from Saint-Malo, which is why it appears in most Brittany itineraries — but it isn’t Brittany and it shouldn’t be the reason you come here.
What’s the best part of Brittany?
Of what I’ve seen, the Pink Granite Coast for landscape and Dinan for towns. Everyone I know who’s been to Finistère insists the answer is Finistère, and I’m not in a position to argue yet.
Your next step, depending on how long you have
One week? Pick a coast and commit to it — northern Brittany for walled towns, pink granite and the most photogenic stretch of the region, or southern Brittany for islands, beaches and a slower trip.
Two weeks? The 14-day itinerary is the exact route I drove, written honestly — four bases, both coasts, and the day that didn’t work.
