| Heading west along the corniche from Honfleur, green fields and fruit trees lull the land's edge, and cliffs rise from sandy beaches all the way to Trouville, 15km away. The resorts aren't exactly cheap but they're relatively undeveloped, and if you want to stop along the coast this is the place to do it. The next stretch, from Trouville to Cabourg, is what you might call the Riviera of Normandy with Trouville as "Nice" and Deauville as "Cannes", within a stone's throw of each other. TROUVILLE retains some semblance of a real town, with a constant population and industries other than tourism. But it is still a resort, with a tangle of busy pedestrian streets just back from the beach that are alive with restaurants and hotels. It's been a chic destination ever since Napoléon III started bringing his court here every summer in the 1860s. One of his dukes, looking across the river, saw, instead of marshlands, money – and lots of it, in the form of a racetrack. His vision materialized, and villas appeared between the racetrack and the sea to become DEAUVILLE, which likes to style itself the "21st arrondissement" of Paris. For a stay in a Deauville hotel, have a search on this website. Now you can lose money on the horses, cross five streets and lose more in the casino, then lose yourself across 200m of sports and "cure" facilities and private swimming huts before reaching the planches, 500m of boardwalk, beyond which rows of primary-coloured parasols obscure the view of the sea.
Pages in section ‘Trouville and Deauville’: Practicalities.
| 
