St. Malo FranceCruise Port Guide

Saint-Malo is one of France's most dramatically situated cities, a walled granite citadel thrust into the English Channel on a tidal island at the mouth of the Rance River in Brittany, its ramparts rising from the sea itself and enclosing a compact grid of medieval streets rebuilt — meticulously, stone by stone — after the Second World War, during which Allied bombing destroyed 80 percent of the intra-muros city. The restoration is so faithful to the original 17th- and 18th-century architectural fabric that only historians know the city was largely a reconstruction. Walking the city's one-mile circuit of walls — 20 feet thick in places, wide enough for two people to walk side by side — is the essential Saint-Malo experience, offering constantly changing panoramas of the harbor, the open sea, and the tidal islands (including the private island château of the Romantic author Chateaubriand, born in Saint-Malo in 1768).

Saint-Malo's history is inseparable from the corsairs — the licensed privateers who operated under royal commission, preying on enemy shipping while filling their own coffers with extraordinary wealth. In the 17th and 18th centuries the corsairs (René Duguay-Trouin and Robert Surcouf are the most celebrated) made Saint-Malo one of the richest cities in France, and their grand stone mansions — malouinières — still stand in the countryside around the city. Jacques Cartier, who sailed from Saint-Malo in 1534 and claimed Canada for France, was born in the nearby village of Rothéneuf, and his statue stands outside the city walls. The corsair tradition gives Saint-Malo a swaggering, independent spirit that still permeates its culture.

The bay of Saint-Malo experiences some of the most dramatic tidal ranges in the world — up to 14 meters between high and low water — and this extraordinary tidal bore has been harnessed by the Rance tidal power station (one of the first in the world), visible from the city walls. At low tide, vast sandy beaches stretch away from the walls and visitors walk to the tidal islands that would be impassable at high tide. Mont Saint-Michel, perhaps the most extraordinary monument in France, lies just 60 km south, making it one of the great excursion destinations from the port.