This week’s travel dream: France’s quiet Atlantic coast

There’s Cap Ferrat, and then there’s Cap Ferret, said Alexandra Marshall in Travel + Leisure. The former is “a place of pop legends, Ferraris, and leathery men” on France’s famous Mediterranean coast. Cap Ferret, a slender spit of land that looks out onto the Atlantic from France’s southwestern shore, feels “much more than a vowel and an ocean away.” Only a 90-minute drive from Bordeaux, it’s a serene land of “pine forests, oyster shacks, rough waves, and practically no hotels.” Both its “landscape and spirit have more in common with salty Cape Cod” than with the glitzy French Riviera.

Separating the “choppy, bracing” Atlantic from the vast, diamond-shaped estuary known as the Bassin D’Arcachon, Cap Ferret seems destined never to be overrun. During summer, “kids on bicycles are as plentiful as hydrangeas,” but laws meant to preserve the local oyster beds ensure that development will be limited. On the ocean side of the cape, only “dunes, shrubs, one or two menacing World War II–era concrete bunkers, and two burger shacks distract from the vistas beyond.” In one direction: an ocean too cold for swimmers. In the other: a view across the lagoon to Europe’s largest sandbank, the 350-foot-high Dune of Pilat.

Because rusticity reigns on Cap Ferret, there’s not much of a gastronomic scene beyond the ever-present option of bargain-priced oysters “hauled out of the ice-blue water straight onto your plate.” As for the social scene, its “throbbing heart” is Marché du Cap Ferret, a covered market with a greengrocer, fish stalls, and a tapas bar—Le Bistrot de Peyo. “Lacoste shirts and boat shoes abound,” as do smiles—which might be partially explained by the bar’s habit of serving $4 glasses of rosé, as well as Manchego cheese, beginning at

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6 a.m. At night, the place to be is Sail Fish, an outpost of the Bordeaux bistro Chez Greg. Disco balls and “tanned-and-toned clientele” aside, it’s really a “simple beach bar.” As the “sun turns low and gold” and the tide recedes, strains of vintage Michael Jackson begin to “intermingle with the sound of the surf,” and Cap Ferret’s bayside shore expands into a “mossy bed of beached rowboats, with herons and gulls picking among the leftovers.”