Treguier

Tréguier is a small town of 2,500 above the Jaudy, just inland from the Côte de Granit Rose in the Côtes-d’Armor. It is a Petite Cité de Caractère, it has one of the finest Gothic cathedrals in Brittany, and it is the birthplace of Saint Yves — the patron saint of lawyers.

The town grew rich in the Middle Ages on linen and hemp, shipped down the river to the Channel, and the merchants’ houses in the centre are the result.

The cathedral

Saint-Tugdual was built between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it is unusual in having three towers of three different periods, one of them Romanesque and surviving from the earlier church. The openwork spire is eighteenth-century, paid for by Duke John V.

Inside: the tomb of Saint Yves — a nineteenth-century reconstruction of the fifteenth-century original destroyed at the Revolution — and a fifteenth-century cloister of forty-eight arcades, one of the best preserved in Brittany, with recumbent tomb figures under the arcades.

Saint Yves

Yves Hélory de Kermartin (1253–1303) was an ecclesiastical judge in Tréguier who made his name defending the poor for nothing and refusing bribes — hence the medieval tag Sanctus Ivo erat Brito, advocatus et non latro, Saint Yves was a Breton, a lawyer and not a thief.

He is the patron saint of lawyers worldwide, and on 19 May the Pardon de Saint-Yves brings robed magistrates and barristers from across Europe to walk in procession from the cathedral to his birthplace at Minihy-Tréguier. It is a genuinely odd and rather moving thing to see.

The town

• Place du Martray — the main square in front of the cathedral, and the market place
• The timber-framed houses — sixteenth and seventeenth century, on the streets running down from the square
• Maison d’Ernest Renan — the birthplace of the philosopher and historian, born here in 1823, kept as a museum
• The port — down on the Jaudy, a marina now, reached by a walk down through the town
• Bois du Poète — the wooded walk along the river below the town

The Renan statue

Renan’s Vie de Jésus made him the most notorious unbeliever in France, and when the Republic put up his statue on the cathedral square in 1903 the town divided so violently that the bishop staged a rival ceremony and a counter-monument was raised. The statue is still there, facing the cathedral, with a figure of Athena beside him. The quarrel is remembered locally as an event.

Practical

• Market day is Wednesday, 8:30–13:30, on the Place du Martray and the two neighbouring squares.
• Parking — blue zones in the centre, paid 9:00–12:30 and 14:00–18:30 except Sundays and holidays; 1 h 30 maximum with a disc in the windscreen, and a €17 fine without one.

Getting to Tréguier

• By car — 40 minutes from Saint-Brieuc, 20 minutes from Lannion. See parking in France.
• By train — no station; Lannion is 20 km, Guingamp 30 km, both on the Paris–Brest line.
• By bus — local services from Saint-Brieuc and Lannion.

Around

• Côte de Granit Rose — 20 minutes, from Perros-Guirec to Ploumanac’h, and the strangest coastline in France
• Paimpol — 30 minutes east, with Beauport abbey and the steam train
• Île de Bréhat — 40 minutes, by ferry from the Pointe de l’Arcouest
• Pontrieux — 25 minutes, the washhouse village on the Trieux
• Plougrescant — 15 minutes, with the house wedged between two boulders that is on every calendar of Brittany

When to go

May to September, and 19 May for the Pardon. Tréguier is a working small town with a real market and very few visitors — a good base for the pink granite coast at half the price of staying on it.

See Brittany and Petites Cités de Caractère.

Nearby

Other places on this site within easy reach, as the crow flies:

• Morlaix — 50 km
• Moncontour — 65 km
• Saint-Malo — 90 km
• Dinan — 94 km
• Cancale — 102 km
• Brest — 102 km

Weather in Tréguier

Updated: 29 October 2026