Honfleur: The Vieux Bassin, Sainte-Catherine and Boudin's Harbour

Required Activities

• Walk the quays right round the Vieux Bassin, then go into the Lieutenance — the 16th-century Caen gate with its two round towers, the only piece of Honfleur's walls still standing — and find the bust of Samuel de Champlain on its outer face, who sailed from this basin

• Stand under the older left-hand nave of Sainte-Catherine, built in the second half of the 15th century like a market hall out of ships' timbers, and look for the axe marks: the town's maîtres de hache cut the whole frame without using a saw. Then compare it with the rounder 16th-century nave beside it, and find the chestnut shingles on the outside walls

• Go through the Musée Eugène-Boudin in the chapel of the old Augustinian convent and pick out the same stretch of estuary painted by Boudin, Jongkind, Courbet and Monet, then cross to the museum's religious-art annexe inside Sainte-Catherine's detached bell tower

• Cross the Pont de Normandie and stop at mid-span, 59 m above the Seine on the 624 m steel section of an 856 m cable-stayed span, with the concrete pylons standing 215 m over your head

• Find the two surviving greniers à sel behind the harbour, built in the 17th century with Colbert's permission to hold 1,000 tonnes of salt for the Newfoundland cod fleet, and look up at their roofs: the same ships' carpenters framed them like inverted hulls