Saint-Malo: The Corsairs' Ramparts and the Grand Bé

Required Activities

• Walk the whole 1,754 m circuit of the ramparts, counting the nine gates you pass over, and look inwards as you go: the walls came through the American bombardment of August 1944 almost untouched, and the town inside them was rebuilt afterwards in an old style but not stone for stone, so almost everything below you is younger than the wall you are standing on

• Cross the 500 m of sand and causeway from the Bon-Secours beach to the Grand Bé and find Chateaubriand's grave on the western headland — he asked for no name and no date on it, only a cross, and that is exactly what is there; the plaque in front of it says he wanted to lie where he would hear nothing but the sea and the wind

• In the Musée d'Histoire in the castle keep, follow the three trades that made Saint-Malo rich and find where they overlap: Jacques Cartier's voyages to Canada, the corsairs Duguay-Trouin and Surcouf preying on enemy shipping, and the roughly 250 slaving voyages, some 80,000 people, that made this the fifth slave port of France — Surcouf was still fitting out for the triangular trade after it was banned in 1815

• Walk out to Fort National at low tide when it is open — from June, and only on the tides the fort's own flag allows — and pick out from its walls the line of Vauban's other sea forts: the Petit Bé, La Conchée and Cézembre

• On the rampart walk, tell Garangeau's work from what he replaced: find the round medieval towers that survive — the Grand'Porte, the Tour Bidouane, the Tour Qui-Qu'en-Grogne — then the angular bastions he built from 1691 to stop cast-iron shot, and the kennels built into the bastion de la Hollande in 1684 for the dogs that were turned loose on the shore at night