| The former fishing village of DINARD sprawls around the western approaches to the Rance estuary, just across from St-Malo but a good twenty minutes away by road. While it might not feel out of place on the Côte d'Azur, with its casino, spacious villas and social calendar of regattas and ballet, here in Brittany it's a little incongruous. Its nineteenth-century metamorphosis was largely thanks to the tastes of the affluent English and Americans, though these days age rather than nationality seems to be the common factor uniting most of its summer influx of tourists. Although Dinard is a hilly town, undulating over a succession of pretty little coastal inlets, it attracts great numbers of older visitors; as a result, prices tend to be high, and pleasures sedate. Central Dinard faces north to the open sea, across the curving bay that holds the attractive plage de l'Écluse. As so often, the buildings that line the waterfront are – with the exception of the casino in the middle – venerable Victorian villas rather than hotels or shops, and so the beach itself has a low-key atmosphere, despite the summer crowds. An unexpected statue of Alfred Hitchcock dominates its main access point; standing on a giant egg, with a ferocious-looking bird perched on each shoulder: he was placed here to commemorate the town's annual festival of English-language films. Enjoyable coastal footpaths lead off in either direction from the principal beach, enlivened by notice boards holding reproductions of paintings produced at points along the way. It may well come as a surprise to see that Pablo Picasso's Deux Femmes Courants sur la Plage and Baigneuses sur la Plage, both of which look quintessentially Mediterranean with their blue skies and golden sands, were in fact painted here in Dinard during his annual summer visits throughout the 1920s. The path that heads east leads up to the Pointe du Moulinet for views over to St-Malo, and then as the Promenade du Clair de Lune continues past the tiny and now-exclusive port, and down to the estuary beach, the plage du Prieuré.
Pages in section ‘Dinard’: Practicalities.
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