It's worth knowing about the zoo park in PALMYRE (daily: April–Sept 9am–7pm; Oct–March 9am–noon & 2–6pm; www.zoo-palmyre.fr; €10.67), 10km northwest of Royan up the D25 coast road, especially if you're travelling with children, although its tacky advertising, with chimps dressed in human clothes, may put you off. Once you're inside, there are plenty of exotic species – from elephants and wild cats to gorillas and monkeys – housed in spacious enclosures covering fourteen hectares. To reach it, there are buses all day from Royan's gare routière and the place Charles-de-Gaulle.An ideal bicycle or picnic excursion just over an hour's ride from Royan is to TALMONT, 16km up the Gironde on the GR360 – apart from a few ups and downs through the woods outside Royan, it's all level terrain. The low-crouching village clusters about the twelfth-century church of Ste-Radegonde, standing at the edge of a cliff above the Gironde. With gabled transepts, a squat tower and an apse simply but elegantly decorated with blind arcading – all in weathered tawny stone and pocked like a sponge – it stands magnificently against the forlorn browny-grey seascapes typical of the Gironde. The entrance is through the north transept, where the rings of carving in the arched doorway depict acrobats standing on each other's shoulders and, in the outer braid, two tug-of-war teams hauling roped lions up the arch. The inside is as unpretentiously beautiful as the exterior.
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