Saint Malo Attractions

The Breton port of St-Malo has a magnificent situation on a former island now joined to the mainland at the mouth of the broad river Rance, facing the town of Dinard across the river to the west. Still surrounded by its old walls, it preserves the aspect of a fortified coastal town of the Middle Ages.

During the Second World War the old town was largely destroyed, with the exception of the walls, but was rebuilt after the war in its original style, with narrow little streets and tall granite houses.

The town takes its name from a Gallic monk named Maclow who became bishop of Aleth in the sixth century, Aleth was the predecessor of the present town of St-Malo, which was founded about 1150 on a nearby rocky island. St Malo's heyday was in the 16th-18th centuries, when Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), a native of the town, discovered Canada (1534) and established some of his fellow-citizens as its first settlers, and when other daring seamen from St-Malo were sailing the seas in all directions. The writer and statesman François- René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) was born in St Malo.