Normandy

Claude Monet lived in this pink house with green shutters from 1883 until his death in 1926, and spent much of those decades shaping the garden as though it were a canvas. The flower garden in front of the house, the Clos Normand, is a dense, deliberately untidy mass of colour that changes from tulips and irises in spring to dahlias and nasturtiums in autumn. Across the road, through a tunnel, lies the water garden he dug from a marshy meadow, with the Japanese-style green bridge, weeping willows and the lily pond that obsessed him for the last thirty years of his life. Inside, the house keeps his yellow dining room and his large collection of Japanese prints.

The foundation that runs the house usually opens from April to the start of November, and 2026 is the centenary of Monet's death, with exhibitions in Giverny and Paris. A few minutes' walk away, the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny shows temporary exhibitions on Impressionism and its legacy.

TipBook a timed ticket online and arrive at opening or in the last hour; May and June, when the wisteria and roses peak, are the busiest months.

Normandy's historic capital is crowned by one of the great Gothic cathedrals of France, its west front a lacework of stone with two unmatched towers, one of them nicknamed the Butter Tower because, so the story goes, it was paid for by the sale of dispensations to eat butter during Lent. The cast-iron spire added in the nineteenth century made it, briefly, the tallest building in the world. Monet painted the façade more than thirty times at different hours and in different weather, and some of the canvases now hang in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Inside lies a tomb holding the heart of Richard the Lionheart, who was both king of England and duke of Normandy.

TipOn summer evenings a free light show is projected on the façade, partly inspired by Monet's series; check the city's dates.

West of the cathedral, the old town is one of the best preserved in France, with streets of crooked half-timbered houses leaning over the cobbles. The Rue du Gros-Horloge passes under a Renaissance arch carrying a huge gilded astronomical clock, which you can visit from the inside, and leads to the Place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen. A tall cross marks the spot beside the modern Church of St Joan of Arc, whose swooping slate roof suggests flames or an upturned boat and which shelters sixteenth-century stained glass rescued from a church destroyed in the war. The Historial Jeanne d'Arc, in the archbishop's palace where her rehabilitation trial took place, tells her story with projections.

TipThe Museum of Fine Arts, a short walk north, has a strong Impressionist collection and is free for its permanent galleries.

In a loop of the Seine west of Rouen stand the roofless white towers of one of the oldest and most powerful Benedictine abbeys in Normandy, founded in the seventh century, rebuilt after Viking raids and consecrated in 1067 in the presence of William the Conqueror. After the Revolution it was sold off and used as a stone quarry, and what survives is a magnificent ruin: two western towers rising more than forty metres, a nave open to the sky and lawns scattered with ancient trees. The drive along the river through the Seine meanders, past other abbeys at Saint-Wandrille and Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville, is a pleasure in itself.

The chalk cliffs of the Alabaster Coast reach their most dramatic at Étretat, a small resort on a pebble beach framed by two headlands. To the west, the Falaise d'Aval has been carved by the sea into a natural arch, the Porte d'Aval, with a slender needle of rock, the Aiguille, standing offshore; to the east, the Falaise d'Amont has a little chapel on its crest. Footpaths climb both cliffs for views that drew Courbet, Monet and Maupassant, and the area has become famous again with readers of the Arsène Lupin novels, whose gentleman thief hides his treasure in the needle.

TipStay well back from the cliff edges, which crumble, and don't try to walk round the base of the cliffs at low tide without checking tide times, as the sea cuts off the coves quickly. Early morning avoids the coach parties.

Across the Seine estuary via the soaring Pont de Normandie, Honfleur is the prettiest port on the coast. Tall, narrow slate-fronted houses crowd around the Vieux Bassin, the old harbour, where yachts have replaced the fishing boats and the quays are lined with cafés and galleries. Explorers sailed from here to Canada in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Samuel de Champlain before he founded Quebec. The town's other jewel is the Church of St Catherine, the largest wooden church in France, built by shipwrights after the Hundred Years' War with a roof like two upturned hulls and a separate bell tower. The painter Eugène Boudin, a mentor to the young Monet, was born here, and the museum named after him shows his skies and beaches.

TipDay-trippers fill the harbour by late morning in summer; staying overnight lets you see it at its quiet best at dawn and dusk.

A short drive west along the Côte Fleurie, Deauville has been the chic seaside retreat of Parisians since the 1860s, when a half-brother of Napoleon III developed it as a resort. It has a racecourse, a grand casino, mock-Norman half-timbered villas and palace hotels, and a long, wide sandy beach lined with rows of colourful parasols. The famous boardwalk, Les Planches, has beach cabins named after the film stars who have attended the American Film Festival held here each September. Coco Chanel opened one of her first boutiques in the town. Neighbouring Trouville, just across the river, is more of a working fishing town, with a lively fish market and old-fashioned brasseries.

Before heading to the beaches, it's worth giving half a day to this museum on the northern edge of Caen, a city that was largely destroyed during the battle that followed the landings. It sets D-Day in the wider context of the Second World War and the Cold War, from the failures of the 1919 peace to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and covers civilian suffering and the Holocaust as well as the fighting. The exhibits are thorough and sometimes harrowing, and it's a good way to understand why the landings happened and what followed. In Caen itself, William the Conqueror's castle and the two great abbeys he and his wife Matilda founded survived the bombing.

TipThe museum is not ideal for young children in places; the galleries flag the more distressing sections.

Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, three British gliders landed within metres of this bridge over the Caen Canal at Bénouville, and the troops aboard captured it, and a second bridge over the Orne nearby, within minutes. It was among the first actions of D-Day, intended to protect the eastern flank of the invasion. The original lifting bridge was replaced in the 1990s and now stands in the grounds of the Memorial Pegasus museum, and the Café Gondrée beside the canal, often described as the first house in France to be liberated, still serves drinks.

The easternmost of the five landing beaches runs from Ouistreham west towards Lion-sur-Mer. British troops landed here on the morning of D-Day, along with French commandos of the Kieffer unit, the only French soldiers to come ashore that day, who fought their way into Ouistreham's casino. Today it is a family resort again, with a long sandy beach and memorials along the seafront; the Grand Bunker museum in Ouistreham occupies a five-storey German concrete tower that was part of the Atlantic Wall.

Around 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed on Juno Beach, centred on Courseulles-sur-Mer, on 6 June 1944, and suffered heavy losses on the first waves. The Juno Beach Centre, built by veterans and opened in 2003, is Canada's museum of the Second World War in France, telling the story of the whole country's war effort as well as the landing itself, often through the voices of individual soldiers. Young Canadian guides lead tours of the surrounding dunes and German bunkers. A few kilometres inland, the Canadian war cemetery at Bény-sur-Mer holds more than two thousand graves.

British forces landed on Gold Beach, stretching from Ver-sur-Mer to Arromanches. On a hillside above it, the British Normandy Memorial, opened in 2021, lists the names of more than 22,000 men and women under British command who died on D-Day and during the Battle of Normandy in 1944, carved on stone columns that frame a view down to the sea. Its sculpture of three soldiers wading ashore, by David Williams-Ellis, has become one of the most photographed images on the coast.

Because the Allies knew they could not capture a working port quickly, they towed two artificial harbours across the Channel in prefabricated pieces, code-named Mulberries. The one at Arromanches, Port Winston, was in use for months and landed hundreds of thousands of men and vast quantities of vehicles and supplies. At low tide you can still see the great concrete caissons stranded in an arc across the bay. The D-Day Museum on the seafront explains how the harbour worked, and the Arromanches 360 cinema, on the cliff to the east, shows a short film of archive footage on a circular screen.

TipWalk up to the clifftop viewpoint by the 360 cinema to see the whole line of the harbour remains laid out below.

On the cliffs between Gold and Omaha stand the only German coastal guns in Normandy still in their casemates: four concrete bunkers, some still holding their 150-millimetre naval guns, and a command post on the cliff edge. The battery exchanged fire with Allied warships on D-Day before being silenced. It is free to wander, and the clifftop setting, with wide views of the coast, makes the scale of the defences easy to grasp.

Bayeux was one of the first towns in France to be liberated, on 7 June 1944, and escaped almost undamaged, so its medieval streets, watermills and huge Norman Gothic cathedral survive intact. The town is best known for the Bayeux Tapestry, the 70-metre embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England, made in the eleventh century and probably commissioned for the cathedral's consecration in 1077.

Be aware that the tapestry is not in Bayeux at present. Its museum closed for a major renovation and rebuilding project, with reopening announced for autumn 2027, and the tapestry itself has been lent to the British Museum in London, where it is on show from 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027, its first visit to England since it was made. Bayeux remains worth a stay for the cathedral, the Museum of Art and History (MAHB) with its lace and porcelain, the Battle of Normandy Memorial Museum, and the Bayeux War Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery of the Second World War in France.

TipLondon tickets for the tapestry sold out quickly; check the British Museum's site for each new release.

On the bluff above Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer, 9,389 American service personnel lie beneath rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David on immaculate lawns, most of them killed in the landings and the battles that followed. A colonnade and a bronze statue, The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves, face the graves, and the Walls of the Missing in the garden behind carry over 1,500 names. The visitor centre, set among the pines, tells the story of the operation through the lives of individuals. Each afternoon, an hour before closing, the flags are lowered in a short and moving ceremony.

This is a war grave, and visitors are asked to behave accordingly: quiet voices, no picnics, and respect for families who come to visit particular graves.

TipThe path from the cemetery down to the beach has been closed since 2016; reach the sand by road from Saint-Laurent or Vierville instead.

Omaha was the bloodiest of the landing beaches: American troops coming ashore here on the morning of 6 June met intact defences on the bluffs above, and casualties ran into the thousands before small groups fought their way up the draws, the valleys leading inland. Today it is a broad, gentle curve of sand backed by holiday homes, and the contrast is part of its power. At Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, the steel sculpture Les Braves rises from the sand at the water's edge, and memorials and German strongpoints line the low cliffs. The Overlord Museum at Colleville and smaller museums in Vierville and Saint-Laurent fill in the story.

TipWalk along the beach at low tide, when the sand stretches far out and you can appreciate how much open ground the soldiers had to cross.

Between Omaha and Utah, a headland rises thirty metres sheer from the sea. On D-Day, US Army Rangers scaled these cliffs with ropes and ladders under fire to reach a German gun battery, only to find the guns had been moved inland; they found and destroyed them, then held the position for two days against counter-attacks at heavy cost. The clifftop remains a lunar landscape of bomb craters and shattered bunkers, now grassed over, managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission. A granite pylon on the cliff edge honours the Rangers.

TipKeep to the marked paths; the cliff edge is unstable and parts of the site are fenced off as erosion continues.

The westernmost landing beach, on the Cotentin peninsula, saw American troops come ashore with far fewer losses than at Omaha, partly because strong currents carried the first waves to a less defended stretch. The Utah Beach Landing Museum, built around a German bunker on the dunes, displays landing craft and a rare B-26 bomber. Memorials to the units who landed here stand along the seafront, and the flat, empty beach stretches away to the north.

Inland from Utah, this small market town was one of the first in France to be liberated, by American paratroopers who dropped in the night before the landings. One of them, John Steele, famously caught his parachute on the church tower and hung there for hours, and a dummy paratrooper still dangles from the roof in his memory. The Airborne Museum opposite tells the story of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, with gliders and an aircraft displayed in purpose-built halls.

At the western edge of Normandy, a granite island rises from a vast bay of sand and tidal water, topped by an abbey whose spire carries a gilded statue of the Archangel Michael. Monks first built here in the eighth century, and the abbey grew over the following centuries into a stacked marvel of halls, cloister and church balanced on the rock, with a fortified village spiralling up beneath. It was a major pilgrimage site, then a prison after the Revolution, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with its bay. The tides here are among the largest in Europe, and on the highest spring tides the sea briefly surrounds the island completely.

Cars cannot drive to the island. You park in the official car parks on the mainland, a few kilometres away, and either walk along the causeway and footbridge in around 40 to 50 minutes or take the free Passeur shuttle bus, which runs from early morning to midnight and drops you a short walk from the gates. The abbey ticket costs €13 at the full rate, with free entry for EU residents under 26.

TipArrive early or stay for the evening, when the day-trippers have gone and the village's single main street, the Grande Rue, empties. Never walk out onto the sands without a qualified guide: the tide comes in fast and there are patches of quicksand.