Between Christmas and New Year 2025, we left Paris to discover a corner of France I had not yet explored: Normandy. More precisely, a stretch of coastline that had long drawn me in, the famous Côte d’Albâtre (literally Alabaster Coast in English).

Between ever-changing skies and a sea sometimes blue, sometimes pearl-grey, the Côte d’Albâtre stretches for nearly 140 kilometers, from Le Tréport in Seine-Maritime to Le Havre, marking the natural boundary between land and the English Channel. This long ribbon of chalk cliffs, among the highest in Europe, rises in places to more than 100 meters.

Sculpted over millennia by erosion, the coast owes its name to the whiteness of its rock, reminiscent of alabaster. Yet beyond its spectacular landscapes, the Côte d’Albâtre is also a land of stories of harbors, fishermen, artists, and memory. Impressionist painters, writers, sailors, and soldiers have all left their mark here, making this shoreline a concentrated essence of Normandy: wild, luminous, and deeply shaped by the sea.