Pointe du Raz
Interesting facts
- About a million people a year now come to the headland, double the roughly 500,000 counted in 1990.
- To restore the site, the hotels on the point were demolished in 1996 and the shopping centre in 1997, with services moved 800 metres inland.
- Beneath the point the sea has carved the Enfer de Plogoff, a tunnel roughly 60 metres long running through the rock from east to west.
- A marble statue of Notre-Dame-des-Naufragés, Our Lady of the Shipwrecked, by the sculptor Cyprian Godebski stands on the headland.
- The semaphore on the summit plateau is one of 59 such stations that keep watch over the French coastline.
- Out in the Raz de Sein, the lighthouse on the islet of Tévennec was lit in 1875 and became an unmanned light in 1910.
- Despite its reputation, the Pointe du Raz is not the westernmost point of mainland France: that title belongs to the Pointe de Corsen to the north.
- In 1882 the painter Georges Clairin depicted women burning seaweed at the point in his canvas Les brûleuses de varech à la Pointe du Raz.
- When Storm Ciarán struck on 2 November 2023, gusts at the headland reached about 207 km/h.
- The protected Grand Site was enlarged in 2019 to some 8,700 hectares spread across five communes.
Why it is worth it
At the far western end of Cap Sizun, the granite of Brittany narrows into a jagged blade of rock that runs out into the Atlantic. The Pointe du Raz rises about 72 metres above the sea and drops away in broken cliffs and scree towards the water, where waves break constantly over the reefs. Its Breton name is Beg ar Raz. Beyond the tip, a line of rocks and islets leads out towards the low island of Sein, and the whole scene is dominated by wind, spray and the restless current of the strait.
That strait gives the headland its name. The Raz de Sein, the passage between the point and the Île de Sein, is a notoriously dangerous stretch of water; the word raz, which the Bretons took from the Norman language, shares its origin with the English word race, meaning a strong current, both going back to Old Norse. To guide ships through it, the lighthouse of La Vieille, "the Old Woman", was built on the Gorlebella rock just off the point. Planning began in 1861, but fierce tides allowed work only for part of each year, and the light was first lit in 1887. It is one of the remote French sea lights that keepers called "hells", and it was among the last in France to be automated, in 1995.
The point forms the southern prong of a rocky trident thrusting into the Iroise Sea, together with the Crozon peninsula and the Pointe Saint-Mathieu, and it is linked by the sweep of the Baie des Trépassés to its northern twin, the Pointe du Van. Painters such as Eugène Boudin travelled here in the nineteenth century, and Daphne du Maurier used the headland as an image of tempestuous feeling in her novel Frenchman's Creek. The site was classified as a protected landscape in 1987 and received the Grand Site de France label in 2004. It is also the western end of the long-distance E5 footpath, which runs some 3,200 km to Venice.
Getting there
The Pointe du Raz lies at the western tip of the commune of Plogoff in Finistère, about 31 km from Douarnenez in a straight line. The nearest airport is Brest Bretagne (BES), about 51 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Pointe du Raz is a promontory that extends into the Atlantic from western Brittany, in France.
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