Charming Seaside Town of Cabourg

Saturday – A relaxed and slower start to allow Pauline, Mehdi and Hector to have their ablutions before us. Mehdi and Pauline went to Caen for shopping and to see a movie, whilst we caught up on all our messages and paperwork. After lunch we had a look at the charming seaside town of Cabourg. The building style is very quaint, and I’m told typical Normandie, a mix of old and new. It’s a great place and appears very livable. Our time was rushed because Aziz was cold and wanted to go home. He’s not really interested in much, only his own things. We are looking forward to the time on our own and to be able to enjoy our surroundings without the pressure of running from shop to shop with no time to look at things that interest us.

It was from Cabourg that William the Conqueror drove the troops of Henry I of France back into the sea in 1058. But the modern Cabourg began in 1853 with the arrival of two Paris financiers in search of a new site for a luxurious watering-place. The railway age had made the Normandy coast accessible to holidaymakers; Dieppe, Trouville and Deauville to the east had already been discovered; but here the adventurers found a virgin expanse of barren dunes and level sea-sands ripe for development. By the 1880s an unreal city of villas and hotels had arisen, in a semicircle whose diameter was the seafront, whose center was the Grand Hotel, and whose radii were traced by a fan-work of avenues shaded with limes and Normandy poplars.Read more