This week’s travel dream: The Côte Fleurie’s seaside cool

Normandy’s Côte Fleurie is like the south of France without the fanfare, said Seth Sherwood in The New York Times. Only two hours from Paris by car or train, this stretch of France’s northern coast “doesn’t require a private jet to reach it.” Mega-yachts are rare and Calvados, the local apple brandy, is preferred over Cristal. The Côte Fleurie still “serves up film festivals, expansive beaches, seafood-laden local cuisine,” artistic history, celebrity residences, and luxury casinos. “But unlike its southern sibling,” it does so with subtlety rather than spectacle.

Of all the seaside villages on the Côte Fleurie, Honfleur stands apart as the region’s “cultural heart.” “Crowned with green hills,” the picturesque port at the mouth of the Seine became an escape for Parisians as early as the 1860s. Today, throngs of travelers wander its “spider web of cobbled streets, ambling past town houses” of red brick and gray stone. A “town that begs to be painted,” Honfleur has inspired French artists for generations. The great neo-impressionist Georges Seurat was drawn to the old harbor, French fauvist Raoul Dufy “pointed his easel” toward the steeple of the centuries-old Église Ste.-Catherine, and Claude Monet painted sunbathers filling the golden sands and “sailboats buffeting along the whitecaps”—scenes still being played out today.

Farther west along the “craggy, wind-swept coast,” Deauville is an “impeccable town of Norman mansions: elegant, Old World, half-timbered houses with wooden balconies, Queen Anne–style protrusions,” and witches’-hat turrets. Now principally a holiday getaway, the town has long attracted “Europe’s crème de la crème,” who flock to its film festivals and polo championships. Cabourg, at the Côte Fleurie’s westernmost end, is “more bohemian.” At casino parties hosted by Le Baron, a Parisian nightclub, “beer-swilling local guys” mingle with the “City of Light’s gilded youth.” There are, of course, no velvet ropes barring the entry. If Cannes and the whole Côte d’Azur find their American counterparts in “glammy spots like Miami or Malibu,” the Côte Fleurie isn’t even Nantucket. It’s Martha’s Vineyard.

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Contact: Francetourism.com