Saint-Mathieu Lighthouse

Few lighthouses stand in company as strange as Saint-Mathieu's. The white tower with its red crown rises straight out of the ruined nave of a Benedictine abbey on the Pointe Saint-Mathieu, the cliff-edged headland at the western tip of Brittany where the Iroise sea meets the approaches to Brest. Beside it are a naval signal station and a memorial to French sailors lost at sea, so that one short walk takes in eight centuries of the coast's relationship with the sea.

A light burned here long before the present tower. From the late seventeenth century the Royal Navy kept a lantern in the square tower of the abbey itself; in 1689 it tried out a closed glazed lantern there, a design that proved so much better in wind and rain that it was then adopted at other French lights. Monks tended the fire for a time in exchange for rights over wrecks, and the abbey tower survived the Revolution's sale of the ruins precisely because it served as a light. By the 1830s it was too low and too decrepit, and the navy built a new round granite tower, partly with stones taken from the abbey. It was lit on 15 June 1835.

The tower is 37 metres high; a spiral staircase of 163 steps climbs the centre of the shaft, with eight rooms for stores and keepers arranged in a ring around it, to a light set about 55 metres above the sea. The optics went from rapeseed oil to petroleum and were electrified in 1932. The present paintwork, white with the name SAINT-MATHIEU in red and a red band at the top, dates from 1963; the light was automated in 1996. Together with Kermorvan it marks the line of the Chenal du Four, the channel ships take between the mainland and the islands. The tower is a listed historic monument, and from the gallery the view runs over the abbey ruins, the semaphore and the scattered reefs and islands of the Iroise.

Getting there

The lighthouse is at Plougonvelin, about 22 km west of Brest. Brest Bretagne Airport (BES) is about 29 km away. The ruins of the abbey can be visited at any time.