Quimper is a city of about 63,000 in Finistere, the far western department of Brittany, and it is the historic capital of Cornouaille. THE NAME IS THE GEOGRAPHY: Kemper is Breton for a confluence, and the Steir joins the Odet in the middle of the old town. It is the sort of French city that rewards two unhurried days rather than one busy one.
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What Is Here
SAINT-CORENTIN CATHEDRAL HAS A DELIBERATELY CROOKED NAVE AND IT IS THE FIRST THING TO LOOK FOR. The Gothic church was built between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, and the nave bends several degrees off the axis of the choir. The usual explanation is marshy ground and the awkward plot between the two rivers rather than any symbolism, and whatever the cause it is visible the moment you stand at the west door and look down the length of it. The two spires are much younger, added in the 1850s, and the mounted figure between them is King Gradlon, the legendary ruler of the drowned city of Ys. The image at the top of this post is the west front from below.
QUIMPER MEANS PAINTED POTTERY TO MOST OF FRANCE. Faience has been made here since 1690 in the Locmaria quarter downstream, and the hand-painted Breton figures in blue and yellow are the city's export. The workshops in Locmaria run tours and sell seconds, and the Musee de la Faience sets out three centuries of it. If you buy a piece, remember it is earthenware and it travels badly in a soft bag.
The medieval centre is the second image and it is small, dense and almost entirely pedestrian. The half-timbered streets cluster around the cathedral, with the Rue Kereon running east from the west front and giving the classic view of the spires framed by leaning houses. Place Terre-au-Duc and the Rue du Sallet are the other two worth walking.
There are two serious museums and they are different in kind. The Musee des Beaux-Arts on the Place Saint-Corentin holds a strong nineteenth and twentieth century collection including the Pont-Aven school, which matters because Gauguin worked half an hour from here. The Musee Departemental Breton, in the old bishops' palace right beside the cathedral, covers Breton costume, furniture and archaeology, and is the better of the two if you want to understand the region rather than look at paintings.
BRETON IS A LIVING LANGUAGE HERE AND YOU WILL SEE IT ON EVERY STREET SIGN. Quimper is one of the centres of the Breton revival, the bilingual Diwan schools started in this department, and the Festival de Cornouaille in the third week of July is the largest celebration of Breton music and dance anywhere. If your dates fall in late July, book accommodation months ahead and expect the whole city to be given over to it.
Mont Frugy is the wooded hill on the south bank, a fifteen minute climb from the Odet footbridges, and it gives the view over the roofs and the spires that the postcards use.
Quimper is also the base for the end of the world. The Pointe du Raz, the dramatic headland that gives Finistere its name, is about an hour west. Benodet and the Odet estuary are twenty minutes south, Concarneau and its walled island town half an hour east, and Locronan, a preserved weaving village, twenty minutes north.
ONE HONEST NOTE ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS POST. Quimper is thinly photographed in the stock libraries. The three images here are the cathedral front, a street in the medieval centre and a weathered wall, and the things you might most expect to see, the Odet quays with their flower boxes and footbridges, the faience painters at work and the costumes of the Festival de Cornouaille, are not available to us. We would rather say so than imply a set we do not hold.
When to Go
May, June and September are the best of it. Long days, gardens in flower, and the summer crowds either not yet arrived or gone.
July and August are busy and warm rather than hot, and the third week of July is the Festival de Cornouaille, which is a reason to come or a reason to avoid depending on what you want.
Winter is mild, grey and very wet. Finistere is the wettest corner of France, and January daytime temperatures sit around 9 degrees with rain on more days than not.
RAIN IS THE CONSTANT AND IT IS NOT SEASONAL. This is the Atlantic coast of Brittany: it rains in July as well as in November, usually in short bursts driven by wind off the sea rather than all day. Pack for it in every month and you will never be caught out.
Getting There
By train, Quimper is the end of the line from Paris Montparnasse, about three and a half hours direct on the TGV, with the station a ten minute walk south of the cathedral.
By air, Quimper Bretagne has a small number of domestic flights and Brest is about an hour and a quarter by road with more.
By car, about six hours from Paris and two from Rennes.
The old town is walkable and you do not need a car in it, but you do need one, or an organised tour, for the Pointe du Raz and the smaller coastal villages, because public transport to them is thin outside July and August.
Is Quimper Safe for Women?
Quimper is a quiet French provincial capital and is safe. The FCDO publishes no advised-against areas anywhere in France, and its terrorism wording is the strongest it uses: terrorists are very likely to try to carry out attacks in France, with shopping centres, entertainment venues, sporting events, transport hubs and crowded gatherings named as possible targets. The everyday risks are more specific than that sounds. Pickpocketing is organised on the Paris Metro and on trains, typically in pairs with one person distracting you, and the FCDO records SERIOUS ASSAULTS on RER lines B and D, which matters because line B is the train most visitors take from the airports. Drink spiking is named with the drugs rather than hinted at: be alert to the possible use of date rape drugs including GHB and liquid ecstasy. Strikes and demonstrations happen at short notice and can stop trains and close roads, usually peacefully. And wildfires affect the south in hot dry summers.
If you are driving to a Channel port, the FCDO has a specific instruction. It records attempts by people to enter private vehicles in order to reach the UK illegally, that camper vans are targeted while stationary or in slow traffic, and that obstacles are sometimes placed on roads to ports including the Calais port road. Keep your doors locked, keep moving where it is safe to do so, do not leave the vehicle unattended, and if it is not safe to proceed, stop and call 112.
The realistic risks here are weather and footing rather than crime. The medieval streets are granite setts and cobbles, they are wet for much of the year, and a fall in smooth soles is by far the likeliest thing to go wrong on this trip.
THE ODET IS TIDAL THROUGH THE CITY and the quay walls are low and unfenced in places. The river rises and falls several metres with the tide, which surprises visitors who assume a town centre river is a fixed thing.
If you go out to the Pointe du Raz or any Finistere headland, treat the cliffs seriously. There are no barriers on most of that coast, the granite is slippery when wet, the wind arrives in gusts strong enough to move you, and people die taking photographs at the edge every year somewhere along this shore.
Atlantic swimming on this coast has currents and a real tidal range. Swim on lifeguarded beaches in season and read the flags.
The Quimper Packing List
Wet, windy, mild, and almost all of it on foot.
Our merino base layers are 100% Australian merino at 17.5 micron, and a long sleeve merino wool base layer for women is the right first layer for Brittany in any season: the temperature barely moves between May and October but the wind and the damp do all the work, and wool stays warm when it is damp where cotton simply gets cold. From November to March add a heavyweight merino base layer, because a Gothic cathedral interior in February holds the cold.
A Columbia Fast Trek II fleece as the mid layer, and a Marmot PreCip Eco rain jacket, which in Finistere is a twelve-month item rather than a summer precaution. A hood beats an umbrella on the coast, because the wind will destroy the umbrella.
Waterproof walking shoes with Darn Tough merino socks. Wet granite setts, the Mont Frugy path and the headland tracks all want grip rather than style.
Waterproof hiking trousers if you plan to walk the coast path, where the gorse and the wet bracken soak ordinary trousers in twenty minutes.
Not linked and worth packing: A WINDPROOF HAT that will not blow off, A LIGHT SCARF for the cathedral and the Breton museum, SOMETHING TO COVER YOUR SHOULDERS for the churches, A REFILLABLE BOTTLE since the tap water is good, and BUBBLE WRAP OR A SOFT WRAP if you intend to buy faience, because it is earthenware and it chips. France is card-friendly everywhere including the markets.
Recommended Tours and Experiences
Essential Resources for Women in Quimper
Emergency numbers: 112 for police, ambulance and fire, free from any phone including a locked mobile, with operators who will find an English speaker. It is the single number across the whole European Union.
Quimper is in Finistere, the wettest department in France, and the single most useful thing to know is that the rain is not seasonal: pack a shell in July as well as in January. THE MEDIEVAL STREETS ARE GRANITE AND SLIPPERY WET, which is the likeliest cause of injury here. THE ODET IS TIDAL THROUGH THE CITY with low unfenced quay walls and a range of several metres. THE FINISTERE HEADLANDS, including the Pointe du Raz an hour west, HAVE NO BARRIERS AND VERY STRONG GUSTING WIND. The Festival de Cornouaille in the third week of July fills every bed in the city, so check your dates. Faience bought here is earthenware and needs protective packing. If you drive towards a Channel port, the FCDO's vehicle-entry instruction above applies.
US State Department travel advisory: the France advisory. Read the current level there directly rather than relying on a figure printed in any guide.
UK FCDO travel advice: gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/france, and read the safety and security page rather than only the landing page, because that is where the substance sits.
Main hospital: the Centre Hospitalier de Cornouaille in Quimper has a full emergency department and serves the whole of southern Finistere. Dial 112 for an ambulance or 15 for the SAMU. A pharmacie, marked with a green cross, posts the duty rota in the window. France is in the EU, so a UK Global Health Insurance Card or an EU European Health Insurance Card gives you state-provided medically necessary care on the same terms as a resident, which means you pay the same patient share a French resident pays rather than nothing. That is not the same as free and it does not cover repatriation, so travel insurance sits on top of it. French hospitals are excellent and a pharmacie, marked by a green cross, handles minor problems without an appointment and will tell you where the duty pharmacy is out of hours. Tap water is drinkable everywhere. Dial 15 for a medical emergency or 112 for anything.
Official health authority: Sante publique France, the national public health agency. covers the Brittany regional health agency
US Embassy: the United States Embassy in Paris.
Official tourism authority: Atout France, the national tourism body. publishes the cathedral and museum opening hours, the Locmaria faience workshop tour times and the Festival de Cornouaille dates
Takeaways
Stand at the west door and look down the nave. It bends, and it is meant to.
Locmaria is a twenty minute walk downstream and is where the pottery is actually made.
Mont Frugy takes fifteen minutes and gives you the whole city.
Bring the rain shell whatever the month. Finistere does not do dry seasons.
Solo women safety assessment: Quimper is one of the easier destinations in this batch for a woman travelling alone. It is a departmental capital of 63,000 with a university presence, a compact and almost entirely pedestrian historic core, a station ten minutes from the cathedral, and streets that are busy with ordinary local life rather than with tourism. There is no district to avoid and no hour at which walking the centre becomes a question. 112 REACHES POLICE, AMBULANCE AND FIRE free from any phone including a locked one, 15 reaches the SAMU, and the Centre Hospitalier de Cornouaille is a full hospital in the city rather than an hour away, which is better medical cover than most places this size. FRANCE'S ADVISORY CONCERNS ARE NATIONAL RATHER THAN LOCAL: organised pickpocketing on the Paris transport network, drink spiking named explicitly with the drugs involved, strikes and demonstrations that stop trains at short notice, and a terrorism threat the FCDO describes in its strongest wording. None of that has a Quimper address, and the drink-spiking warning is worth carrying into any student city's Thursday to Saturday nights, which this is. THE RISKS THAT ACTUALLY MATERIALISE HERE ARE PHYSICAL AND WEATHER-DRIVEN. The old town is granite sett and worn stone, it is wet for a majority of the year, and a slip in smooth-soled shoes is the commonest injury a visitor suffers. The Odet runs tidal through the middle of the city with low unfenced walls in stretches, which is worth knowing walking back along it after dinner. And if you take the obvious excursion west to the Pointe du Raz, understand that you are going to an unbarriered Atlantic headland where the wind gusts hard enough to shift your footing and the wet granite offers nothing to hold: stay well back from the edge, and do not do it in smooth soles. ON THE COAST ITSELF, swim only on lifeguarded beaches in season and read the flags, because the tidal range and the currents here are genuine.
Reading On
Quimper is the Cornouaille corner of a large and varied region. The Brittany packing list covers the region as a whole, its tides, its granite and its weather, and the Nantes packing list covers the city at the mouth of the Loire that Brittany still claims as its own. North, the Saint-Malo packing list completes Brittany's walled trio with this post and Vannes, where Quimper leads on the cathedral, Vannes on the ramparts and Saint-Malo on the intra-muros walls and the tide. North and east, the Normandy packing list picks up the next coast, with the Le Havre packing list and Rouen packing list on the Seine. South, the Bordeaux packing list and the Dordogne packing list cover the Atlantic southwest, and the Loire Valley packing list and Amboise packing list the chateaux inland. For the country, the France travel guide for women and the France packing list carry the transport, the regions and the practicalities in full. For why wool suits a damp maritime climate, read the guide to merino wool base layers for women. Every destination we cover is indexed at the travel packing guide for women, and the base layers are at the Roman Trail collection.
If the outer journey is calling you, the inner one usually is too. Explore SoulMap at romantrail.com/blogs/soulmap.
