Mont St-Michel

One of Europe’s most famous and strikingly beautiful sites is tucked in a small bay between Normandy and Brittany. Mont Saint Michel combines architectural sublimity, mighty history, and natural grandeur combine to unforgettable effect.

This walled granite islet is topped with a grand, spire-crowned abbey, and surrounded by sand and tidewater off the mouth of the Couesnon River on northwestern France’s English Channel coast. Though the mount was used in earlier times, the Romanesque abbey was first constructed in the 11th century, under the orders of the Duke of Normandy; additions and reinforcements in subsequent centuries created the ingeniously and ornately designed structure we see today.

At the foot of the abbey lies a walled medieval town, whose fortifications stem from the Hundred Years War, when Mont Saint Michel lay long under siege. It wasn’t only the ramparts, though, that ultimately kept the islet unviolated; the surrounding bay experiences Europe’s most extreme tides, in which high and low water marks may be separated by nearly 50 feet. Their fast-moving advances and retreats (“said to be as fast as a galloping horse,” by Lonely Planet) created a natural barrier to anyone intent on ransacking the mount.

These days, Mont Saint Michel is easily accessed by a bridge from the nearby mainland, and the huge tidal fluxes that were once a barrier, are now a dramatic attraction unto themselves. According to the abbey’s official website, close to 3.5 million people visit every year. On a journey to Mont Saint Michel, you can stroll the vintage “main drag” of the town itself, flush with storefronts and museums housed in 15th- and 16th-century buildings.

You gain the abbey—open daily save for January 1, May 1, and Christmas Day—via the steep and many-treaded Grand Degré (“Grand Staircase”), the ascent of which isn’t necessarily for everyone. The views from the church are as jaw-dropping as the splendid Gothic structures and soaring bell-tower.