To say Royan is like nowhere else in France is no exaggeration. Yes, it's a famous seaside resort town which enjoyed its heyday during la Belle Époque. Its renown, carefree social scene featured horse-drawn carriages, tinkling tram bells, and outdoor cafe terraces where vacationers drank absinthe and enjoyed fashionable sea bathing and thalassotherapy (sea therapy) in the fresh Atlantic air.
This all came to a violent end when a bungled RAF bomber raid destroyed the town and its exquisite architecture on 5th January 1945, well after the liberation of France and with Germany already staring at defeat. Flawed intelligence reported the civilians had been evacuated and that the central district was only occupied by an isolated German garrison. Royan still remembers the January raid as an “inutile et tragique bombardement”, a useless and tragic bombing which resulted in almost 500 fatalities.
Royan sat in ruins for several years until 1949 when the post-war reconstruction program was initiated, naming Royan a priority project. Somewhat controversially, a modernist design was chosen, entrusting the master reconstruction to Claude Ferret, a Bordeaux architecture professor who drew heavily on Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist developments in Brazil (like Pampulha) for inspiration, effectively turning Royan into an experimental laboratory for 1950s modernist architecture.
Our day is completed by a stroll around the many shops and boutiques, and should hunger encroach, there's always steaming mussels, covered with dry pine needles and set alight, producing a smoky
local speciality that turns lunch into theatre.
Back aboard SH Diana with my smartwatch triumphantly proclaiming 10,000 steps, we prepare for tomorrow's first stop at Santander, Spain.
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