Known for their mild climate and “sandy botany”, the four Charente islands lie just off France’s Atlantic coast. With their “preposterously pretty” harbour towns and great oyster beds and salt marshes, they have long drawn holidaymakers, said Antonia Quirke in Condé Nast Traveller.
But though they “jump with life” from early summer, they retain an “enduring tranquillity” and an “immaculately civilised” air. Best known is the Île de Ré – the second largest, at 33 square miles, and the smartest, favoured by wealthy Parisians and so “utterly Gallic” it feels “as if staged by set dressers”. Oléron – the largest, at 67 square miles – is busier and “less bourgeois”, but it too is “full of fresh air” and “good spirits”, as are Aix and Madame, which are tiny by comparison.
From La Rochelle, it’s a quick drive over the toll bridge to Ré. In its “stylish” main town, Saint-Martin-de-Ré, families stroll along the port and through the “stone-flagged” lanes, where bicycles are propped everywhere below “sun-blistered” shutters.
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Equally lovely is the village of Ars-en-Ré, where locals queue for quiche and fruit tarts at the bakery in the main square. Honeysuckle “droops” down terrace walls, and scattered across the countryside beyond are whitewashed cottages “fringed in hollyhocks”. The landscape has a “timeless” quality, with its low horizons, pine forests and vast stretches of sand “the colour of apricots”.
Along the coast, shacks sell a half-dozen “world-class” oysters for a few euros, and there are some wonderful food markets in the towns. Ré has some of the archipelago’s best places to stay, such as Hôtel le Sénéchal and Hôtel de Toiras. But it’s worth spending time on Oléron too, an island that looks “especially astonishing” when approached by boat from Ré.
On a recent trip, I cycled around its “mesmerising” marshes, still “prowled” by paludiers, who harvest salt using wooden hand tools. I also visited the Île d’Aix, where you can tour the villa from which, in 1815, the British took Napoleon off to exile on St Helena.
