A polished Norman beach resort where the boardwalk is lined with wooden beach huts named after film stars and everyone seems to be dressed slightly better than the occasion requires.
Deauville is Normandy dressed up for a party, and it knows it. Lia and I came over from Honfleur for what we thought would be a quick beach stop and ended up staying for the particular theatre of the place — the boardwalk crowd in linen and sunglasses, the racehorses being walked down to the surf at dawn, the casino lit up like it had somewhere better to be than a small seaside town.
The boardwalk of movie stars
Les Planches, the wooden boardwalk running along Deauville’s beach, has been the resort’s centrepiece since 1923, and the striped bathing huts lining it are each named for a film star who has attended the Festival du Cinéma Américain de Deauville, the American film festival the town has hosted since 1975 — a small plaque on each cabin names its actor, and we spent an embarrassingly long time walking the length of the boardwalk reading them off. Deauville became fashionable in the mid-19th century when the Duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoléon III, decided the marshy fishing village across the river from Trouville would make an ideal resort for Parisian high society, and the town has more or less kept up the act ever since. We rented two of the striped chairs facing the sea and did nothing for two hours, which felt like the correct way to use the boardwalk.
Horses, a casino, and the town across the river
Deauville sits directly across the Touques river from Trouville-sur-Mer, an older and noticeably less polished fishing town, and the contrast between the two, a five-minute walk over the footbridge, tells you most of what you need to know about Deauville’s identity. The town is also a serious centre for horse racing and breeding, and we got up early one morning to watch trainers exercising thoroughbreds directly on the beach at low tide, hooves splashing through the shallows in a scene that felt more like a painting than a training session. That evening we walked past the Casino Barrière, its neoclassical façade lit up, and past the grand Normandy Barrière hotel next door, all half-timbering scaled up to palace size, before heading over the bridge to Trouville for a much simpler, much better plate of fried fish.
When to go: Come in September for the film festival atmosphere without full summer crowds, or in early morning any season to catch the horses on the beach before the boardwalk fills up.