With the 300th anniversary of the death of France’s engineer, Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, being fêted around the country, now is the time to go and experience the coast.
Brouage is not the most spectacular of Vauban’s works, but it is one of the most impressive of the coastal defence forts, with a dramatic history and an astounding setting. It stands proud, high and dry, 3km from the coast, with walls where once the sea lapped and boats came from the four corners of the known world.
It was founded as a new town in 1555 by Jacques de Pons, a wealthy landowner who called his achievement Jacopolis sur Brouage. The brouage is the peaty earth of this area of mudflats. The coast was already a thriving producer of salt, and it needed a trading area. Once built it became Europe’s premier salt market, with cod fishermen lining up to stock their boats for the distant seas of the Canadian coast.

Anyone in the family with a passion for singing? Classes at the Conservatoire de musique et de danse, in the splendid Romanesque setting of the Abbaye aux dames in Saintes might just be the place to develop it. Home to the annual Saintes Music Festival in July, the abbey hosts many concerts throughout the year.
The Conservatoire, a municipal-run school teaching to national curricula and examination requirements, offers 31 different activities. As well as the usual instrumental classes for children aged seven and upwards, éveil (introduction) sessions are on offer for five- to six-year olds. It runs several group activities, including orchestral, chamber music and jazz.
Saintes specialises in operatic singing. Clotilde Fiter-Lecomte, who studied in Paris, Basle and Bordeaux and has sung in operas in Australia, Germany and New York, has been at the Saintes Conservatoire since 2004. Classes, given outside school hours, are limited to 10 per level. There are three cycles of three years each. Entry is from age 16 upwards.