Oléron and Brouage: Richelieu's Forts and Champlain's Town

Required Activities

• Walk the 2,080 m circuit of Brouage's ramparts, eight bastions each carrying three échauguettes, then go into the Halle aux vivres — the old victualling store that held 700 barrels below and 300 tonnes of wheat above — for the exhibition on Champlain's voyages and on how this fortress was built on a marsh

• Stop at the island end of the Oléron bridge and look back along its 46 spans: 2,862 m of precast concrete segments, 860 of them weighing 42 to 73 tonnes each, cantilevered out from the piers and glued together — the longest bridge in France from 1966 until Saint-Nazaire took the title in 1974, and tolled until March 1991

• Go in through the Porte Royale of about 1640 and find on its face the arms generally taken to be Richelieu's; then walk the bastions of the citadel that Louis XIV came to see in 1660 and that soldiers of the Acadia garrison trained in from 1710 to 1716 before shipping for New France — and pick out the damage from the Allied bombing of 17 April 1945 against the 1959-71 restoration

• Be on the quay at La Cotinière when the day boats come in, and work out what this coast actually sells: watch a crate come off a trawler, then drive to an oyster cabin on the Marennes-Oléron beds and taste the difference between a claire and a pleine mer — Oléron is the largest island off the French Atlantic coast and the second largest in mainland France after Corsica

• Stand on Brouage's sea curtain and look for the sea: there is none. Up to two hundred ships once anchored below these walls to load salt for the Newfoundland cod fleet, and the whole fortress stands on a floating raft of oak over piles driven into the mud. Walk out into the marsh that buried the harbour and find the underground boat ports cut into the flanks of the Brèche and Hiers bastions