Tourist information -
Dinard
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 noticeboards 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.
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