Tourist information on Deauville, France

With one of the most luxuriant sandy breaches in France, it is not hard to see why Deauville remains one of the country's most popular seaside resorts. Since the 1860s, this upmarket seaside haven on the Côte Fleurie (the Riviera of the North) has attracted those with blood blue and large wallets, and more recently it has started to pull in the glamour-celebrity crowd. With its luxury hotels, majestic casino, stately villas and pristine avenues, Deauville has lost none of its Second Empire gentility, although its charms soon wear thin for those who are not exclusively interested in sunbathing, water sports and gambling, the only three distractions the town seems to offer. Deauville is particularly popular with Parisians, owing to its proximity to the French capital, and has far more snob value than neighbouring Trouville and that other faded glory, Dieppe.

Situated in the Calvados department of Lower Normandy, Deauville wasn't so much discovered as manufactured, in the middle of the 19th century when the upper classes acquired a taste for sunbathing. Prompted by the Duc de Morny, half-brother of the Emperor Napoleon III, a society doctor (Joseph Olliffe) and banker (Armand Donon) invested a large portion of their personal wealth in buying up the nondescript fishing village of Deauville and developing it into a modern seaside resort. The town was designed by the architect Desle-François Breney, who took his inspiration from Baron Haussmann's urban designs for Paris. Once the new town had been completed in 1861, Breney was appointed its first mayor. Although Deauville was initially a big hit with the aristocracy, it fell on hard times in the 1870s when the French Empire fell and an economic downturn took its toll. Things did not improve until the early 1910s, when the new mayor Désiré Le Hoc attempted to reinvigorate the town with some major building projects, which included a new casino and two exclusive hotels, the Hôtel Normandy and the Hôtel Royal. In the years that preceded World War I, Deauville regained its clientèle and its prestige, and soon overtook Trouville as the resort of first choice for the rich and well-connected.

In the 1960s, with aristocrats in short supply, Deauville set out to change its image by tapping into the burgeoning celebrity culture, much as St-Tropez had done in the southern Riviera. The Festival du cinéma américain was created in 1975 specifically for this purpose, attracting well-known American and French film stars to the town each year in September. Films such as Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman (released in 1966) also helped to establish Deauville as an internationally renowned resort for the seriously rich and seriously glamorous. Today's Deauville may not be as elitist as it was in its glory days, but it still possesses a certain grandeur and pride which most other seaside resorts have long since lost. If you get bored sunbathing or frittering away your children's inheritance in the casino, you can always head for the Hippodrome de Deauville-La Touques and try your luck on the gee-gees. For the more adventurous, there is the Deauville Watersports Centre (Centre Nautique), which offers a wide range of sea-based sporting activities.