Dinard is a town and commune on the Côte d'Émeraude, on the northeast coast of
Brittany, France.
It is part of the Ille-et-Vilaine département.
Its beaches and mild climate make it a popular holiday destination,
and has resulted in the town having a variety of famous visitors and residents.
The towns of Pleurtuit and Saint-Malo are nearby and the
Dinard Pleurtuit Saint-Malo airport is about 4km south of Dinard.
read full wikipedia reference about Dinard, France
The former fishing village
of DINARD sprawls around the western approaches to the
Rance estuary, just across from St-Malo but a good twenty minutes
away by road. While it might not feel out of place on the Côte
d'Azur, with its casino, spacious villas and social calendar
of regattas and ballet, here in Brittany it's a little incongruous.
Its nineteenth-century metamorphosis was largely thanks to the
tastes of the affluent English and Americans, though these days
age rather than nationality seems to be the common factor uniting
most of its summer influx of tourists. Although Dinard is a hilly
town, undulating over a succession of pretty little coastal inlets,
it attracts great numbers of older visitors; as a result, prices
tend to be high, and pleasures sedate.
Central Dinard faces north
to the open sea, across the curving bay that holds the attractive
plage de l'Écluse . As so often, the buildings that line
the waterfront are - with the exception of the casino in the
middle - venerable Victorian villas rather than hotels or shops,
and so the beach itself has a low-key atmosphere, despite the
summer crowds. An unexpected statue of Alfred Hitchcock dominates
its main access point; standing on a giant egg, with a ferocious-looking
bird perched on each shoulder: he was placed here to commemorate
the town's annual festival of English-language films.
Enjoyable coastal footpaths
lead off in either direction from the principal beach, enlivened
by noticeboards holding reproductions of paintings produced at
points along the way. It may well come as a surprise to see that
Pablo Picasso's Deux Femmes Courants sur la Plage and Baigneuses
sur la Plage , both of which look quintessentially Mediterranean
with their blue skies and golden sands, were in fact painted
here in Dinard during his annual summer visits throughout the
1920s. The path that heads east leads up to the Pointe du Moulinet
for views over to St-Malo, and then as the Promenade du Clair
de Lune continues past the tiny and now-exclusive port, and down
to the estuary beach, the plage du Prieuré.
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