Vannes et Suscinio

I am feeling fairly lazy today so this post is going to be full of pictures and not much writing.
(Please note that any historical info is based on stuff that tour guides told me in French and therefore is not necessarily true...)

Last weekend, the European University of Brittany organised a trip for foreign students to the town of Vannes, on the South coast of Brittany, and the Chateau of Suscinio. After a nastily early start for a Saturday, we arrived in Vannes. It's another town which was built as a fortress and so it has huge walls surrounding the town centre. We had a guided walking tour through the town (in French of course) and our guide told us all about the buildings and a bit about the history.

A lot of buildings in Vannes look like the one above, with the crisscross wood on the outside and each floor getting bigger and bigger as the building gets higher. These two houses are almost touching each other and since all the streets were built in a similar way, there was a lot of problems with fires. Also, a lot of the streets are very dark because there is not much space for the sunlight to get in.

After the guided tour, we had a some time to look around the town ourselves. So naturally we headed to a bakery to pick up some extra things for our picnic!

After Vannes, we headed to the beach at Suscinio. Despite being October, it was still warm and sunny (well, I thought so anyway) and the beach was almost deserted except for a couple of hardcore French pensioners who were swimming in the sea. We had a proper feast sitting on the beach with all the goodies from the bakery everyone who was not too chicken went paddling.

The Chateau de Suscinio was built very close to the beach. It's another Ye Olde Castle with a moat, ramparts and separate staircases for the Dukes and the commoners. Due to some French law, ancient monuments can only be restored to exactly replicate how they would have been before they were ruined and as the documentation for the castle was only found fairly recently, it is still in the process of being restored. Although it is built with all the necessary trappings for a defensive castle (moat, drawbridge, holes for pouring boiling water on attackers etc etc) it was actually a glorified hunting lodge where the Duke and Duchess could show off their wealth and power to their neighbours.

I learned all this during our second guided tour of the day. We got shown all the different levels of the main lodge and where the Duke and Duchess lived when they were there. They had separate living quarters on different floors of the chateau and even a bathroom of sorts.


A few years ago (actually I have no idea when it was, but a while ago anyway) some archeologists were exploring the castle grounds and came across the remains of the chapel which was built beside the chateau. They discovered that the floor of the chapel was almost completely intact. It's basically a huge mosaic, some of it is just patterns but there are also a lot of paintings of mythical beasts and scary creatures designed to frighten the congregation into behaving. They have put some of the floor on display in the Chateau while they try and find somewhere to keep the whole thing. All in all, probably my favourite castle so far!

Me, Laura and Paola sitting on the well.

The courtyard of the Chateau.

The view from the ramparts.