Paimpol

Paimpol is a port of about 7,000 on the Goëlo coast of the Côtes-d’Armor, in northern Brittany. For most of the nineteenth century it was the home port of the Iceland fleet — the schooners that sailed each February for the cod grounds off Iceland and came back, some of them, in September.

Between 1852 and 1935 around a hundred Paimpol ships and two thousand men were lost. Pierre Loti’s novel Pêcheur d’Islande made the town famous for it, and the song La Paimpolaise did the rest. The trade ended in 1935; the memory has not.

The cod fishery here is older than the Iceland run: Paimpol had been a fishing port since the fifteenth century. The town lies between Saint-Brieuc and Tréguier, within reach of Lannion and Dinard, and though pleasure boats now dominate the harbour, it still holds a working fish market.

The port and the town

• The two basins — now mostly yachts, with a working fishing fleet alongside and old rigged vessels kept in sailing order
• Place du Martray — the square of granite merchants’ houses, sixteenth and seventeenth century
• Musée de la Mer — in an old cod-drying works, on the Iceland fishery
• Musée du Costume — Breton dress of the Goëlo
• Croix des Veuves — the widows’ cross on the cliff at Ploubazlanec, where women watched for the returning fleet; the wall of the churchyard below carries wooden plaques for the crews that never came home
• Bassin 1 and Bassin 2 — the older of the two, Bassin 1, is ringed by the oldest granite houses; Bassin 2 alongside it is given over to leisure boats
• Place des Halles — the weekly market spreads through much of the centre here on Tuesday mornings, the busiest time in town
• Maison Jézéquel — a fifteenth-century house on Rue des Huit Patriotes, among the oldest in town, once a shop supplied with cod landed by local boats
• Maison des Armateurs — one of the largest stone houses in Paimpol
• The old tower — the sole remnant of an eighteenth-century church that once stood on the site, replaced in the early twentieth century by the present church, Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle

Beyond the harbour, the old town has cobbled streets and a scatter of half-timbered houses among the granite ones, particularly around Rue des Islandais.

Abbaye de Beauport

Three kilometres south, on the shore: a Premonstratensian abbey founded in 1202, ruined at the Revolution, and now one of the most atmospheric sites in Brittany. The roofless church, the chapter house and the cellar stand in gardens running down to the salt marsh, and the tide comes up to the walls.

The steam train

La Vapeur du Trieux runs a 1922 steam locomotive up the Trieux valley from Paimpol to Pontrieux — 17 km along the estuary, past the Château de la Roche-Jagu, with a stop at Traou Nez. It runs from May to September and it is genuinely one of the best short railway journeys in France.

Pontrieux at the far end is a Petite Cité de Caractère with fifty washhouses along the river.

The same stretch of the Trieux can also be paddled by kayak.

The coast

• Pointe de l’Arcouest — 6 km, where the boats leave for the Île de Bréhat
• Île de Bréhat — 10 minutes by ferry, a car-free island of pink rock, hydrangeas and mimosa; day trip or overnight
• Sentier des douaniers — the GR34 coastal path runs through the town in both directions
• Loguivy-de-la-Mer — a small lobster port at the mouth of the Trieux, where Lenin spent a summer in 1902
• Île de Bréhat is in fact an archipelago: two larger islands linked by a bridge, with numerous smaller islets around them. In 1907 it became one of the first natural sites in France to be protected by law. Ferries run roughly hourly from April to September and less often out of season

Food

The area’s best-known product is Coco de Paimpol, an AOC-protected white bean grown on the surrounding farmland. The bay also supplies blue lobster, scallops and oysters, along with abalone, mussels and other fish and shellfish.

Seasonal vegetables — potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, artichokes, chicory and shallots — are grown locally too, and turn up on the table alongside the buckwheat galettes found across the region.

See the cuisine of Bretagne and French wines.

Getting to Paimpol

• By train — a branch line from Guingamp, which is on the Paris–Brest TGV route; about 4 hours from Paris in total.
• By car — 40 minutes from Saint-Brieuc, an hour and a half from Rennes. See parking in France.
• By bus — regional services from Saint-Brieuc and Tréguier.
• Tibus — the regional bus network for the Côtes-d’Armor

When to go

May to September, for the boats and the train. The Fête du Chant de Marin — the sea-shanty festival — is held over three days every two years in August and brings a few hundred traditional vessels into the harbour; it is the largest event of its kind in France.

See Brittany and Petites Cités de Caractère.

Nearby

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

• Moncontour — 56 km
• Morlaix — 62 km
• Saint-Malo — 76 km
• Dinan — 82 km
• Cancale — 89 km
• Locronan — 114 km

Weather in Paimpol

This page in Russian: Paimpol (Пемполь)

Updated: 28 October 2026