Cap Ferret - France's smart seaside spot
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You may have seen Cap Ferret without ever having been there. It was the backdrop for the French film Les Petits Mouchoirs, in which a group of self-centred Parisians go on holiday while their mutual friend lies dying in hospital. It is a good movie - full of Gallic emotion and dramatic revelation - but perhaps the best thing about it is the lovely setting and the taken-for-granted lifestyle: the rapier loaves of bread that materialise for breakfast, the wine-soaked dinners en plein air, the messing-about in beds and boats.
Cap Ferret is a long lick of land, like a lolling tongue, located on the coast about an hour's drive due west of Bordeaux. The road grows slower and lazier as you move further along it, and when it turns south into the peninsula, you know you've arrived. The cape is exposed on its western side to the Atlantic, while its eastern shore looks out on the Bassin d'Arcachon, a vast, shallow lagoon that is tailor-made for the business of ostréiculture. The cape supplies all of France with oysters, and so this is a working stretch of coastline. It is, in other words, a real place rather than a holiday resort.
There are no museums, and no attractions apart from (obviously) the beaches, and the chance to live the French life for a little while. (There is, true, a destination restaurant - Chez Hortense - where it would not be a surprise to see the rumpled face of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo looking back at you across the populous tables.) Cap Ferret is akin to the Côte d'Azur - but without the bling and the desperate exhibitionism. You might say it is a kind of European Martha's Vineyard: exclusive, isolated, rather fine.
By far the best place to stay in Cap Ferret is La Maison du Bassin. This hotel would be a find anywhere in the world. But tucked away as it is, down a tiny street in the village des pêcheurs (fishermen's village), La Maison is a buried treasure. It is just marvellously chic and comfortable. The rooms are quite small and there are no televisions, but these are not shortcomings: they make the space feel doubly cosy in an old-fashioned, definitely abroad kind of way. My room was lined with plain wooden panelling, walls and ceiling, so it was like sleeping in the captain's cabin on some luxurious tea clipper.
The shower, in contrast, was constructed from what looked like polished concrete - just as simple as the bedroom, but very modern. The entire hotel pulls off this same trick of reconciling desirable opposites: it is simultaneously stylish and homely, sophisticated and warm.
If you are not staying at La Maison, stop by for a kir or a cocktail at least. The bar is full of locals and regulars - you can tell because nearly everyone who comes in receives a welcoming kiss on both cheeks from the barmaid. I sat weaving imaginary narratives around the rather dapper white-haired gentleman who came in each evening with his lapdog, drank a single glass of Champagne, and headed off silently into the night. After an apéro or two, you will surely be tempted to move through to La Maison's bistrot for dinner.
The food is as straightforwardly elegant as everything else in the hotel. Try the daurade rôtie sur un lit de tomates with some of the faultless house frites. The bistrot claims to lay on 30 desserts daily, which sounds like an idle boast until you see them, set out beautifully: an astonishing array of tarts, flans, pies, mousses, fruit salads and sweetmeats. You wander up and help yourself to whichever dish or dishes take your fancy. Altogether, the terrace at La Maison du Bassin is one of the nicest places you could hope to eat - in France, or anywhere else for that matter.
It is only a few steps to the bassin itself. The lagoon is sailable when the tide is in, walkable when it is out. And when it is out, the boats languish on their sides like fallen goldfish on a sitting-room carpet. The tide is transformational; it turns the Bassin d'Arcachon from a damp desert into a big boating lake and back again. The effect is like watching someone you love trying on a range of outfits for some special occasion: every time you look, the landscape is differently attired, but always alluring and attractive. Across the lagoon from Cap Ferret town is the Dune du Pilat, the highest sand-dune in Europe. It is an impressive sight, resembling a powdered pyramid. With binoculars, you can see that it is sometimes teeming with people climbing or descending its soft seaward face, like purposeless termites on a giant mound.
The foreground, though, is dominated by the tall staves in the water that mark out the oyster-beds. The beds stretch all along the shoreline, their striated, rectangular forms looking like well-tended, submerged fields of vines. Oysters are revered here; they are not so much a local delicacy as a kind of tribal religion.
I popped into a bar in Cap Ferret town for a glass of wine and asked to see the menu. 'Désolée, monsieur,' said the waitress with a shrug and a smile. 'The kitchen is closed today. But if you like I can open some oysters for you.'
Oyster-farming on the cape is nearly always a family business, because the beds are passed down from one generation to the next, like the estates of the English gentry. In many places, you are likely to be waited on by the wife or the daughter of the oyster-farmer who brought your meal ashore. There are waterside restaurants that serve almost nothing but oysters, and are located no more than a dozen strong strokes of the oar from the beds. One such institution is the very charming Chez Boulan in the fishermen's village, and it's as busy as a bucket of crabs every lunchtime.
A lighthouse sits at the hub of Cap Ferret town. Its Cyclops eye is red at night, like a giant blinking traffic light. In the daytime you can climb to the top, and be rewarded with a great view of the peninsula. This is where to get an idea of the strange topography of the place. Look east and there is the town of Arcachon, beyond the drained sink of the bassin; look west and you have the turbulent Atlantic, its white-headed waves launching their twice-daily assault on the remains of a crumbling German gun emplacement. These two bodies of water are, in the end, part of the same sea - but only in the sense that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same person: le bassin and la mer are temperamental opposites: one placid and calm, the other angry and threatening.
The ferry for Arcachon leaves from a long jetty at the northern end of town. I caught the first crossing of the day; the tide was out, and in the sand below the pier there was a single set of Man Friday tracks, left by some crack-of-dawn jogger. I clambered aboard the little boat with the keen birdwatchers, the Lycra-clad cyclists and the taciturn anglers. We all squeezed onto the two rows of benches like day-trippers on a floating charabanc (which is more or less what we were).
It's half an hour to Arcachon, which has more of a seaside feel than Cap Ferret, and is well worth exploring. It was developed as a resort in the 19th century, and the promenade is populated with large hotels. Some of them have grand, balustraded deuxième-empire façades, others are faceless modern constructions.
The big hotels, the shopping streets behind them and the wide, sandy beaches in front are all part of the ville d'été (summer town), the district of Arcachon designed to accommodate and amuse Victorian holidaymakers arriving on the train from Bordeaux. Follow the promenade south, towards the great sandy massif of the Dune du Pilat, and you find yourself in the ville d'hiver (winter town).
It consists mostly of large villas built for rich French consumptives. Many of the houses are splendid neo-Gothic edifices, all turrets and steep roof lines; some of the later ones feature Art Nouveau half-moon windows. The shady streets of the winter town are a good place for a quiet stroll, which should end in the Parc Mauresque. This little arboretum on a hill once accommodated a large casino built to resemble the Alhambra and is reached by a lift.
I spent a leisurely day in Arcachon, and the next morning hired a bike to explore the places I'd seen from atop the lighthouse - the nearby villages of L'Herbe and Le Canon, and the wild Atlantic coast. It was an exhilarating outing. L'Herbe consists of a stretch of promenade, at the end of which is the small L'Hôtel de la Plage where, if you have cycled from Cap Ferret, you can stop for a reviving glass of something. The hotel marks the start of L'Herbe's main street - if you could call it a street at all. It is a row of traditional houses that are part-bungalow, part-beach hut.
They are all painted bright colours; some are half-timbered like a misconstrued Gallic take on the British mock-Tudor semi, others feature decorative gables carved in wood that make them look like dinky Russian dachas. Duck down the alleyways between the houses to sample oysters in a less formal setting than at the brasseries in Cap Ferret town. Take a seat and watch while the sea-farmer affects a few sharp twists of a knife, squeezes half a lemon over the opened shells, and places before you the archetypal Cap Ferret lunch.
From Le Canon (the next village up) you can catch a boat to Ile aux Oiseaux (Bird Island). This is where you will find the so-called cabanes tchanquées, two picturesque little houses standing on stilts to raise them above the oscillating tide. The cabanes are enchanting in a bizarre kind of way, and they are the very symbol of Cap Ferret. They were built on this shallow spot as a base from which the oyster-men could keep an eye on their watery domain. They are, in other words, watchtowers, constructed to ensure that no conchological scrumper could make off with the lucrative crop.
The cycle paths on the cape pass through dense pine forest. The trees on the Atlantic side, under the action of the powerful west wind, all lean back at the same slight angle, like neat italic handwriting inscribed on the powder-blue notepaper of the sky. I pedalled off in search of a coastal spot called Le Truc Vert, just because the name intrigued me: 'the green thing'. I abandoned my bike when the pathway got too soft and sandy, and walked the last quarter of a mile to the ocean. There was nothing green to be seen, not even the ocean, which was grey, hoary and ragged, like the gnarled shell of an oyster. The swell looked dangerous to me, but was clearly a paradise for surfers, who were barrelling landward by the dozen.
The sand beneath my feet, which had been as hot and yielding as fresh-baked bread at the landward side, grew firmer and colder as I approached the water. At the sea's edge, the sun was reflected in the saturated sand like a carelessly dropped doubloon. I stopped to look around me. The roar of the waves was unceasing; they were rolling in as if from an industrial production line. The noise had a strange isolating effect: although I could see other people on the vast expanse of sound, some of them quite close by, I could hear nothing but the ocean.
Stranger still was the fact that the wind and the waves had somehow conspired to create a chilly, savoury mist I could taste on my tongue. It lent a bleached-out, soft focus to the surroundings, like the dream sequence in a film. In the middle distance, the sea mist cloaked the beach in blurry darkness, though the sun was still high in the sky. It was as if a cold night were loitering with intent to mug the bright, balmy afternoon. It seemed to me that only I could see this strange phenomenon, and it could have felt deeply sinister, but it was in fact beguiling, hypnotic. It added up to the oddest and most memorable quarter of an hour I have ever spent beside the sea.
Best Cap Ferret hotels
La Maison du Bassin (00 335 56 60 60 63) is a tiny hotel with immense panache in Cap Ferret. Doubles from €140
Côté Sable (00 33 5 57 17 07 27) is a stylish, modern hotel and spa with views of the bay. Doubles from €195
Restaurants and bars
Le Bistrot du Bassin (00 335 56 03 72 46) offers indoor and outdoor dining at La Maison du Bassin. Be sure to book a table in advance. Dinner for two from €60
Reservations are also necessary at Chez Hortense (00 33 5 56 60 62 56); ask for a table with a view across the bay to the Dune du Pilat. Dinner for two from €80
L'Escale (00 33 5 56 60 68 17) and Pinasse Café (00 33 5 56 03 77 87) are two establishments joined together - you walk through one to reach the other - beside the jetty in Cap Ferret. L'Escale has the slight edge, and so is always marginally busier. Dinner for two from €60 at both
Chez Boulan (00 33 5 56 60 77 32) is an authentic oyster restaurant on the southern side of town. Dinner for two from €60
Au Bureau (00 33 5 56 8322 21) is a pleasant café-bar in Arcachon's ville d'été.
The bar at L'Hôtel de la Plage (00 33 5 56 60 50 15) in L'Herbe is a locals' haunt in one of the cape's prettiest villages.
Le Mirador (00 33 5 56 60 64 19) is a decent café-restaurant at the end of the cape.
Things to do in Cap Ferret
Visit the market in Arcachon (open Tuesday to Sunday) and buy ingredients for a beach picnic. Hire a bicycle; there are lots of cycle routes, and the villages are worth exploring. Locabeach is a good bike-hire shop with several locations. Take a boat trip to Ile aux Oiseaux where you can see the cabanes tchanquées up close.
The best time to visit Cap Ferret
From May to July when the average daytime temperature is 23°C.
How to get to Cap Ferret
EasyJet flies from several UK airports to Bordeaux. Cap Ferret is then an hour's drive. Eurostar has a regular service from London to Paris, from where a train to Bordeaux takes three and a half hours.
