Deauville and Trouville: Les Planches, the Film Festival and the Fish Market Across the Touques

Required Activities

• Walk the full 1,800 m of the promenade-dyke past the Bains Pompéiens and work out the beach's colour code as you go — the parasols are orange, red, blue or green by sector — and look for the nœud deauvillais, the local knot that holds each one against the wind

• Cross the Touques on the line of the pont de l'Union, opened in 1861 to join the new resort to the old one, and settle the argument for yourself — a contemporary wrote that Deauville was not a patch on Trouville for either beach or greenery, just a lot of sand and far too much showing off

• Buy fish from a stall in the halle aux poissons on the quay — the Norman-style hall Mayor Fernand Moureaux had built to Eugène-Maurice Vincent's plans when paid holidays brought working families to Trouville — and find the seawater pool from the same campaign along the front

• Find two addresses on opposite banks: the villa Breloque at Deauville, where Eugène Boudin spent his last year and died on 8 August 1898, and the Hôtel des Roches Noires at Trouville, which Monet painted in 1870 and where Marcel Proust and later Marguerite Duras spent their summers

• Walk the grid behind the casino to the Arcades, still there with their shops below and letting rooms above, and look at how the villas sit above their basements — the streets were raised a metre and a half over the drained marsh, so every owner had to fill his plot and build on top of it