2023-08-20 16:30:00
Calvados, Orne, Manche, Seine-Maritime: Normandy never ceases to surprise us.
By Louise Cuneo, Victoria Gairin, Claire Lefebvre This is the most famous dispute in French geography: is Mont-Saint-Michel in Brittany or Normandy? © LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP Published on 08/20/2023 at 4:30 p.m.
Why is Mont-Saint-Michel Norman?
This is the most famous dispute in French geography: is Mont-Saint-Michel in Brittany or Normandy? If the two regions are regularly torn around the belonging of the famous rock, “the Couesnon in its madness has put the mountain in Normandy”. This Breton proverb has, in fact, been repeated for centuries. We find it in a slightly different form in a book from 1582, but it seems to be even older. The Couesnon indeed marks the ancestral border between the duchies of Normandy and Brittany. The mouth of the river would have moved west of Mont-Saint-Michel, bringing the abbey into Normandy. Bored by this accident of nature, the Bretons are obviously only waiting for one thing: “And when the Couesnon regains its reason, the mountain will become Breton again. “READ ALSO Mont-Saint-Michel is Breton, according to… the European Council
An archipelago with variable geometry
From 65 to 5,000 hectares: this is the size of the Chausey archipelago, made up of more than 350 granite islets and white sand beaches, off Granville, in Normandy. The origin of this amplitude is linked to the high tides that occur at each equinox: up to 14 meters in amplitude, which places these high tides in third place in the world after those of the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, and those of the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel.
Switzerland in Normandy?
Meeting point of the old and hard rocks of the Chausey archipelago and the recent and soft rocks of the Paris Basin, the region of “Norman Switzerland”, straddling Calvados and Orne, owes its name to its landscapes of small mountains. , compared at the end of the 18th century, by naturalists and the first tourists, to the Swiss Alps.
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