How to get lost in… Cap Sizun

Détour n°XVI — Sardines, Poems, and Morning Meals

At the western tip of Cornouaille, Cap Sizun feels like the last frontier before the Atlantic swallows everything whole. This jagged peninsula, caught between the Bay of Douarnenez to the north and the Bay of Audierne to the south, is a place where granite cliffs clash with a sea straight out of an adventure novel. Its most famous natural sites — Pointe du Raz, Pointe du Van, and the ominously named Baie des Trépassés (“Bay of the Dead”) — tell the story of a region shaped by legends and the sometimes violent energy of the ocean.

At the gateway to Cap Sizun (to be honest, I’m not even sure we’re officially in Cap Sizun yet — it depends on the sources and the time period — but it sounds better this way, doesn’t it ?), the port town of Douarnenez stands as a haven of political and cultural commitment.

Once the sardine capital of France, Douarnenez used to smell of fish, echo with the sound of industrial work, and raise its fist in social struggles. Today, the sardines have almost all disappeared, taking with them most of the canneries that once lined the port. A few still hold on — stubborn, delicious, living witnesses to a local history and a pocket-sized gastronomy.

Clinging to the hillside above the Rosmeur harbor, the old fishermen’s district tells the story of crowded families, women bent over steaming vats, and the cannery bosses looking down from above. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé once dismissed the town with a snobbish wave of the hand, calling it “childish, fit at best for painters” — a very French culinary specialty of contempt. Meanwhile, a more obscure writer, the poet Georges Perros (whom I recently discovered thanks to my friends Victor and Clémentine), settled here in the 1950s to write modern, sensitive books about ordinary life and its quiet pains.

“I left my friends, and on my machine,
A motorcycle
Which one of my friends, precisely, had bought me
Knowing my vice, the wind,
The speed of the wind,
Legs tight against that gas-fed belly
A bit like on a horse, I imagine,
A horse with two wheels and this unpleasant noise
For those who don’t get to enjoy
The movement.”

(A humble and imperfect amateur translation of a poem by Georges Perros from his collection Les Poèmes Bleus.)

Today, Douarnenez is anything but naive. It is the laboratory of a fragile, threatened resistance — a different way of life, standing at the crossroads of battles for an affordable, creative, and modern city that embraces its past, dares to face the future, and fends off the constant push to turn coastal land into playgrounds for the rich.

Believe me, something is happening here, far from Paris and the centralizing heartbeats of French power. Between fishermen’s housing projects and artists’ studios, between bustling docks and low-profile restaurants trying to blend in, Douarnenez is reinventing itself without turning its back on the sea. You can feel it in the air, in the salty plates, in the activist bookstores, and in the workshops hidden at the end of steep little alleys. Let’s hope it lasts!

L’ITINÉRAIRE