A hundred and twenty kilometres of coastline, half-timbered villages, five D-Day beaches, two towns of art and history: the whole of Calvados lies around the campsite in Port-en-Bessin.
Calvados is just the right size: from one end to the other, it's barely more than an hour's drive. From Port-en-Bessin, everything is within reach: the D-Day beaches to the west, the Côte Fleurie and Deauville to the east, Bayeux ten minutes away, Caen forty, and behind them, the Pays d'Auge with its orchards, cheeses and half-timbered houses. It's a department of seaside and bocage at once, where you go from beach to orchard in twenty minutes. Camping Portland, a five-star Yelloh Village, is the starting point: cottages, a heated water park and a restaurant on site.
None of the great sights of the département is more than an hour's drive away: you can go out every day without ever repeating the same journey.
The coast, the hedgerow country of the Bessin and the hills of the Pays d'Auge: three very different landscapes, twenty minutes' drive apart.
The cider route, between Cambremer and Beuvron-en-Auge, takes in some twenty farms selling cider, pommeau and calvados at the door.
Hills, orchards, manor houses and villages listed among the most beautiful in France, Beuvron-en-Auge first among them, with its square lined with half-timbered houses. This is picture-postcard Calvados, forty-five minutes from the sea.
Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha: four of the five beaches of 6 June 1944 lie in Calvados, along eighty kilometres of coast. The campsite sits between the last two, Gold and Omaha; museums, batteries and cemeteries line the road all the way to the Pointe du Hoc.
The first town in France to be liberated, untouched, with its cathedral, its 11th-century Tapestry and its medieval lanes. Around it lies the Bessin: hedgerows and stone farms running down to the cliffs and the fishing harbours.
Port-en-Bessin, Grandcamp, Courseulles: Calvados is still a department of fishermen. Scallops from October to May, a daily fish auction, boats coming in on the tide, and quayside restaurants where you eat what has just been landed.
An hour to the south, the castle where William the Conqueror was born still raises its square keep on its rocky spur. The visit, richly staged, is a great hit with children; the town, destroyed in 1944, rebuilt itself around it.
Between Villers-sur-Mer and Houlgate, four kilometres of black clay cliffs gullied by the rain, famous for their fossils: ammonites and dinosaur bones. You walk there at low tide, looking up at rockfalls that resemble a lunar landscape.
Photo credits: Raimond Spekking, DimiTalen, Viault, Myrabella, UBothFr91, Renhour48, Ikmo-ned, stanze / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA / CC0).
Photo: stanze · CC BY-SA 2.0Signposted between Cambremer and Beuvron-en-Auge, it links some twenty producers who open their cellars and orchards: farmhouse cider, pommeau, cask-aged calvados. You stop in the villages (Cambremer, Bonnebosq, Beuvron) and leave with enough to last the week. As good on a rainy day as on a sunny one.
5-star cottages and a 2,020 m² heated water park, in Port-en-Bessin facing the Channel.
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