Étretat Cliffs

Interesting facts

The White Bird of Nungesser and Coli was last seen from France as it crossed the coast at Étretat on 8 May 1927, which is why their memorial stands here.

The cliffs are made of chalk from the Turonian and Coniacian stages of the Late Cretaceous, laid down on a sea floor roughly 90 million years ago.

During a single three-week stay in 1883, Claude Monet painted around twenty canvases at Étretat, and he came back every year until 1886.

The painter Eugène Isabey is credited with discovering Étretat as a subject for artists, spending six months painting there in 1820.

Marie-Antoinette had an oyster park at Étretat, from which fresh oysters were sent to the royal court at Versailles.

Two queens of Spain, Maria Christina and her daughter Isabella II, spent their summers in Étretat in the 19th century.

Maurice Leblanc, creator of Arsène Lupin, lived in Étretat, and his villa, Le Clos Lupin, is now a museum devoted to the gentleman thief.

The site draws more than three million visitors a year, with around 3,000 people a day walking the cliff tops in summer.

Why it is worth it

The cliffs of Étretat are the best-known stretch of the Alabaster Coast of Normandy, where the chalk plateau of the Pays de Caux ends abruptly in white walls up to about 90 metres high. On either side of the small resort's shingle beach, the sea has carved the rock into forms that look almost designed: to the west, the Falaise d'Aval with the great arch of the Porte d'Aval and, standing in the water beside it, the Needle, a free-standing spire of chalk; to the east, the Falaise d'Amont with the smaller Porte d'Amont. Further west, about half a kilometre beyond the Porte d'Aval, the Manneporte is the largest and most secluded of the three arches.

Look closely at the cliff faces and they are striped with dark lines of flint nodules set in the pale chalk, a record of the sea floor that laid them down. The rock is riddled with passages too. The Trou à l'Homme, a karst tunnel at the foot of the Falaise d'Aval, takes its name from a local story of a Swedish sailor washed into it after a shipwreck in 1792. Above, the Chambre des Demoiselles is a small grotto tied to another legend, and it plays a part in Maurice Leblanc's 1909 Arsène Lupin novel L'Aiguille creuse, which imagined the Needle as a hollow treasure-house.

The light on this coast drew painters long before mass tourism: Boudin, Daubigny and Courbet worked here, and Claude Monet painted the arches and the Needle again and again in the mid-1880s, in every weather and at every hour. Maupassant described the Porte d'Amont in his novel Une vie. On top of the Falaise d'Amont stand the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, rebuilt after the Second World War, and a monument and small museum honouring Nungesser and Coli, the aviators who took off from Le Bourget in 1927 in the White Bird to fly the Atlantic and were never seen again. Stairways of 180 and 263 steps climb the two cliffs, and the site has carried the Grand Site de France label since 2012.

Getting there

Étretat lies about 32 km north-east of Le Havre along the coast; the town of Montivilliers is about 18 km away. Deauville Normandie Airport (DOL) is about 38 km away across the Seine estuary. From the town beach, footpaths and stairs lead up both cliffs.

Étretat Cliffs

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists