Étretat

Étretat was a fishing village before nineteenth-century artists and writers made it famous. Eugène Boudin, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny and Claude Monet all painted the cliffs and the beach, and Monet's many canvases of the arches helped make them one of the best-known views in French art. Guy de Maupassant spent much of his childhood here and built his house, La Guillette, in 1883.

The novelist Maurice Leblanc, creator of the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, also lived in Étretat and set his 1909 novel L'Aiguille creuse (The Hollow Needle) among its cliffs; his house is now the Clos Lupin museum. In 1927 the aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli were last seen in France over Étretat as they set off in L'Oiseau Blanc to fly non-stop to New York; they were never found, and a monument and museum on the clifftop recall them.

Étretat has around 1,100 residents, and in summer and at weekends day-trippers from Le Havre, Rouen and Paris fill its streets. Fishing boats are still pulled up on the shingle, and local menus feature mussels, scallops and other seafood, alongside Normandy cider, cream and cheeses.