Quiberon Town Hall

At 7 Rue de Verdun, Quiberon Town Hall may look like a typical civic building today, but its past is much more glamorous. Behind those red facades is a direct link to the days when Quiberon was becoming a fashionable seaside resort. In the late 19th century, as the railroad brought growing numbers of visitors to what had once been a small fishing town, this building was actually a grand hotel catering to well-to-do guests who came to experience the new craze for sea bathing.

So the town’s municipal offices now occupy what was once one of Quiberon’s most elegant tourist establishments. The town likes to point out that some of the biggest names of the era passed through the center and stayed here, including the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, who traveled through Quiberon on her way to Belle-Île, as well as writers Anatole France and Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert had been coming to the peninsula since 1847 and wrote about it in his travel notebooks.

The author of Madame Bovary left behind a colorful, slightly mocking portrait of his local innkeeper—a real character whom he described as something of an aristocrat in slippers, drinking with a local mason one moment and cooking steak and lobster for his guests the next. But it wasn’t only the locals who caught Flaubert’s attention. A visit to the cemetery and ossuary left a much darker impression on him.

He was so struck by this side of Quiberon that he later wrote that the peninsula’s entire past could be summed up in a massacre, referring to the bloody Royalist landing of 1795. Not exactly the kind of story you expect from a seaside vacation spot. Don’t worry, though—the rest of the route is perfectly safe, even if this violent episode in Quiberon’s past still has a few more surprises in store.