What to do in Ille-et-Vilaine

Ille-et-Vilaine is where you enter Brittany: Rennes is an hour and twenty five minutes from Paris by train, Saint-Malo two and a half hours. The department takes its name from its two rivers, and its coastline is short, about forty kilometres, but it has the most spectacular tides in Brittany.

Saint-Malo

The walled city burned in August 1944: six hundred and eighty three of its eight hundred and sixty five buildings were destroyed, eighty per cent of the old town. The rebuilding is said to be “identical”, but that is a manner of speaking: only a dozen façades were rebuilt stone by stone, the rest being new buildings in the old style. The work lasted until the 1970s. The ramparts held: they are original and can be walked in an hour, over two kilometres.

Rennes

The Breton capital is one of the youngest cities in France, with one inhabitant in four a student. Its centre keeps three hundred and seventy half timbered houses, survivors of the fire of December 1720 that destroyed eight hundred and fifty houses, forty per cent of the upper town. The Parliament of Brittany, burned in 1994 during a demonstration, has been restored and can be visited.

The Lices market, on Saturday morning on the Place des Lices, is the second largest market in France: nearly three hundred stallholders and ten thousand visitors, from 7:30am to 1:30pm.

Cancale and its oysters

The Cancale oyster beds cover seven hundred hectares in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, and are fully uncovered at low tide. The Pointe du Grouin, three kilometres away, looks out to the Île des Landes, a bird reserve where cormorants and gulls nest.

The markets

Sixty one markets are held in the department, mostly in the morning and all year round. It is the best plan for a rainy day, and the safest: a market does not close.

Where to stay