A country · 2,089 places · 10 regions
France, all of it.
2,089 curated places across 10 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — metropolitan France, Réunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe — read below as chapters, with 6 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · metropolitan France · 1,602 places
metropolitan France
Étretat is a small resort of roughly 1,300 residents on the Côte d'Albâtre, the chalk coast of the Pays de Caux, about 28 kilometres north-east of Le Havre and 85 west of Rouen. The town occupies a dry valley that meets the Channel in a shingle bay barely a kilometre wide, closed at each end by white cliffs of Cretaceous chalk shot through with flint bands. Everything about the place is that geology. To the south-west the Falaise d'Aval throws out a natural arch, the Porte d'Aval, with a detached chalk needle — the Aiguille — standing about 50 metres out of the water beside it, and beyond that a second, far larger arch, the Manneporte. To the north-east the Falaise d'Amont carries a chapel and, on its clifftop lawn, a monument shaped like an aircraft wing. How a fishing village became famous. Étretat lived on herring and mackerel until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the railway reached the coast and Paris discovered sea bathing. What made it culturally central was paint. Gustave Courbet worked here in 1869 and produced The Cliffs at Étretat after the Storm; Eugène Boudin came; and Claude Monet returned repeatedly between 1883 and 1886, producing dozens of canvases of the Manneporte, the Porte d'Aval and the boats on the shingle, painting the same arch in different weather until the weather itself became the subject. Guy de Maupassant grew up partly here and set stories on these cliffs; Offenbach composed in a villa above the bay. The old timber-framed market hall on Place Maurice-Guillard is a 1926 reconstruction in the sixteenth-century manner, and the tarred upturned boats used as fishermen's huts, the caloges, still sit on the shingle. On screen and on the page. Étretat's fame in the twenty-first century runs through Arsène Lupin. Maurice Leblanc lived in the town, and in L'Aiguille creuse (1909) he made the Aiguille literally hollow — a chamber inside the needle holding the treasure of the kings of France, reached by a stair cut inside the cliff. His villa on rue Guy-de-Maupassant is now the museum Le Clos Lupin, staged as a walk-through of the fiction. Netflix's Lupin, created by George Kay with Omar Sy as Assane Diop, turned that connection into a global one: the second run of episodes, released in 2021, brings the story to Étretat, uses the cliff path above the Porte d'Aval and the beach below for its most exposed sequences, and builds its plot around Leblanc's hollow needle as a puzzle Assane has to read. The production shot on the real clifftop, which is why the geography on screen is accurate — the arch, the needle and the golf links behind them are exactly where the show puts them. Local visitor numbers rose sharply afterwards, and the coastal path now carries a load it was never engineered for. What you actually see today. Two clifftop walks define a visit, and both start from the seafront promenade. South-west, a stair and then a grass path climb the Falaise d'Aval to a viewpoint directly above the arch, then continue past the 1908 golf course to look down on the Manneporte; allow an hour and a half return, with real exposure at the edge and no railings for much of it. North-east, a gentler climb reaches the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, rebuilt after the war, and the Nungesser-Coli monument commemorating the aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli, whose biplane L'Oiseau Blanc was last seen over this coast on 8 May 1927 attempting the Atlantic crossing westward; a small museum sits beside it. Below the Amont cliff, Les Jardins d'Étretat began as an actress's private garden in 1905 and were redesigned from 2017 into a set of sculpted topiary terraces with contemporary art, hanging directly over the bay. At low tide the shingle opens a passage through the Porte d'Aval towards the Manneporte — check the tide table, because the return is cut off well before high water and people are rescued from here every season. Getting there and timing. There is no station in Étretat. Trains run to Le Havre or Bréauté-Beuzeville and buses connect from both; by car it is around 40 minutes from Le Havre on the D940. Parking near the seafront fills by mid-morning in summer. The cliffs face north-west, so the arches light up late in the day and the best photographs come in the final two hours before sunset. Wind is the constant: bring a layer even in July, and expect the clifftop grass to be slippery after rain.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Réunion · 17 places
Réunion
The capital of Réunion sits on the island's northern coast, lined with restored Creole mansions and colonial-era administrative buildings. Its palm-shaded seafront promenade and lively markets give a taste of the island's blended French and Malagasy culture.
✦ May to November · $$
Chapter III · Martinique · 10 places
Martinique
Martinique's capital, wrapped around a broad bay guarded by the 17th-century Fort Saint-Louis. The Schoelcher Library's ornate ironwork facade, the covered spice market, and waterfront park La Savane anchor a compact center that blends French urban life with Creole flavor.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Guadeloupe · 9 places
Guadeloupe
The dramatic eastern tip of Grande-Terre, where limestone cliffs and jagged sea stacks take the full force of the Atlantic. A short trail climbs to a cross-topped viewpoint overlooking the crashing surf, the lagoon beaches nearby, and La Désirade island on the horizon.
✦ December to May · $
Regions of France
Every place in France
