‘Like Saint-Tropez 50 years ago’: western France’s little-known island escape
Two new boutique hotels have added a sprinkle of chic to the sleepy, serene, Île d’Yeu
The first whisper of the secret island came to me from Domitille Brion, the Paris-based co-founder of fashion brand Soeur. In between discussing fabrics and silhouettes, she revealed that she drew inspiration from an enchanting island called the Île d’Yeu.
Was this lost in pronunciation? Had I misheard her say Île de Ré? No, there really is a little 23 sq km idyll off the Vendée coast in western France that only my most Francophile friends had heard of — and even they hadn’t actually been.
With two new boutique hotels opening in the past two years, Les Hautes Mers and La Mission, it seemed Île d’Yeu could be my perfect under-the-radar French island. Authentic, yet with a sprinkle of chic. Somewhere to enjoy secluded beaches and also get a decent Negroni.
So I was intrigued to spend four days there as part of a summer road trip with my family. It lies 17km from the mainland, and while the wealthy or impatient can arrive by helicopter or light aircraft, we opted for the 30-minute catamaran ride from Fromentine, a little port about 75 minutes’ drive south-west of Nantes. (There’s also an hour-long route in summer from Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, further down the coast).
We left the car on the mainland and travelled as foot passengers — there are car ferries, but they are infrequent, more expensive and, given the island is only 10km long and 4km wide, most people get around on bikes. As always, when discovering somewhere new, the boat trip afforded me half an hour of frantically anticipating whether it would really be a hidden pearl or just holiday grit.
My first impression of Port-Joinville, the main town on Île d’Yeu, where the ferry docks, was more of a working harbour than I expected. Fishermen unloading their catch, lively market stalls, crêperies and cafés, and a seemingly chaotic road with cyclists weaving in and out of honking traffic. Pretty enough, but was this the picture-postcard utopia I had envisaged?
However, as we arrived at our hotel, La Mission, my tendency to prematurely catastrophise the latest holiday choice melted away. Opened in May by the Hôteliers Impertinents group, which owns several hotels in Paris, it’s located in charming Saint-Sauveur, in the middle of the island, one of its three main villages. Think narrow streets lined with whitewashed houses featuring terracotta roof tiles and colourful shutters.
The hotel — a former garrison dating from the time of Napoleon III — retains its traditional style. Arranged like a cloister, the 22 bedrooms, restaurant and Nuxe spa are set around a swimming pool and gardens with kiwi and passion fruit vines, lending a truly relaxing, sanctuary-like atmosphere. The decor taps into that eclectic aesthetic of wicker furniture and stripes seen in hotels from Mama Shelter to the Experimental Group, but this is a calmer, more classic version.
On our first evening there was a DJ playing gentle electropop in the garden, while islanders and hotel guests converged to sip cocktails around the pétanque pistes. My 11-year-old and I sat in a deckchair, him reading Murdle and me wondering why Frenchmen have such good hair.
At dinner, it was an equally stylish scene: well-heeled multigenerational families with quiet children spurning the kids’ menu and eating locally fished albacore tuna ceviche without spilling it on their pristine white linen. Chic millennials on a hotel date night wearing where-did-they-get-that hippy blouses that I later discovered were from the market in Saint-Sauveur. I even spotted two style mavens from the Paris fashion world gliding into the restaurant, including a former French Vogue writer.
According to Michel Delloye, co-founder of Les Hôteliers Impertinents, the island is “like Saint-Tropez 50 years ago or Cap Ferret 20 years ago. Many private homeowners come from around the world to reconnect with this authenticity — the King of Belgium has his own house here, and there is a small community of Wall Street financiers and famous actors.”
After a lazy start, the next morning it was time to get on the hotel’s bicycles and explore: my two older children and I selected Instagrammable white Dutch bikes. For my husband and our five-year-old — who is about as stable on a bike as a panda on a unicycle — an electric tandem.
I’m a snowflake cyclist. I don’t do rush-hour jeopardy or those English country lanes where vans whizz past within millimetres. Fortunately, it turned out that the seemingly hectic scene around Port-Joinville was just one seafront road, with its own local logic, and the rest of the island offers the kind of carefree freewheeling depicted in Jules et Jim. There are a few main roads used by cars, but most are vintage Citroën 2CVs and Renault 4s, and there are numerous car-free tracks.
Also absent are Lycra-clad road hogs. Instead, think teens in stripy tops playing French pop as they ride, and flâneur-ish hands-free cyclists (one hand holding a cigarette, the other gesticulating).
And what a rush — in August! — to find deserted paths leading to near-empty beaches. On our first morning, we headed for the wild and rocky south coast (known as the côte sauvage), down lanes edged by hedgerows of ferns, blackberries and sloes, over twisted tree roots on sandy tracks where leaning pine trees created aromatic arches, and along moorland teeming with butterflies fluttering through crisp air scented with honeysuckle, gorse and salt. The island is largely flat, but after some Sisyphean attempts to get up a slight gradient, I found myself being pushed along by a septuagenarian local while her friends smirked at this undignified spectacle.
Plage des Soux was my favourite beach, a hidden cove of golden sand and clear waters more similar to those in Devon or Cornwall than the wide beaches and slightly khaki sea of the Vendée mainland. Plage des Sabias was similarly appealing, though less wild, with sailing yachts and fishing huts a picturesque addition. It sits near the Vieux Château, a striking fortress from the Middle Ages perched on the rocks.
Such historic sites crop up all over the island. There’s the Grand Phare, a lighthouse once powered by oil lamps, then rebuilt in 1951 after being destroyed in the second world war, and the beautifully spare white chapel of La Meule, built in the 11th century and overlooking the harbour village of the same name. In another league of antiquity are the dolmens, simple rock constructions dating from prehistoric times and boasting jolly names such as the Pierre du pain et du beurre (the bread and butter stone).
That evening I visited the chapel and watched the sunset from the high, illuminated rocks at the end of La Meule’s harbour wall. This dusk bike ride was a particular delight, the only sounds the murmur of conversation from one waterside bar, the clicking of my bicycle spokes, the call of circling swallows and church bells. The silence of golden hour.
And so the slow rhythm of our stay continued: criss-crossing the island in our little bicycle convoy, breaking off to eat or swim in the reassuringly refreshing Atlantic. Highlights included a long alfresco lunch of lobster rolls and chocolate lava cake with pine sap milk pudding at Les Hautes Mers — a 25-room hotel a few steps from the Plage St Aubin that was opened by the Paris-based Domaines de Fontenille group in 2022. And dinner at La Ferme d’Émilie, a bucolic restaurant on an organic farm, serving dishes with fruit and vegetables picked that morning.
In the market of Saint-Sauveur we shopped for picnic ingredients and artisanal fripperies, from soap to vintage dresses. Stalls snake down a narrow street framed by bars and restaurants, such as À l’abri des Coups de Mer — a ’70s time warp with giant ceiling fans, tiled bar and net curtains, filled with laid-back locals in their bleu de travail workers’ jackets — and the Dilettante wine bar, which sells a delicious organic sparkling white of the same name. We stocked up on baguettes, goat’s cheese and hefty coeur de boeuf tomatoes with sculptural ridges, and a giant strawberry tart from the island’s Mousnier bakery.
If Île de Re is Disney France, this is more of an art-house film, steeped in character. Much of the island feels untouched by time, preserved somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 1970s. Such serenity is a rare find, not least in a place I could easily reach from the UK without flying. Many people attribute the timeless atmosphere to the fact that there is no bridge, unlike those built to connect the mainland with the nearby Île de Noirmoutier in 1971, and the Île de Re in 1988.
“It’s still a little bit secret, even in France,” says Morgane Couchet, manager of Les Hautes Mers. “As soon as you arrive at the ferry terminal in Fromentine and take the boat, you’re completely escaping.” Wealthy Parisians who come to switch off make up a large portion of the summer population. When August is over, their departure makes it sleepier still.
But for now, I’m inclined to agree with Michel Delloye that the new, more sophisticated hotels are meeting a demand, rather than ironing out the island’s character. Over at the market in Saint-Sauveur, I talked to a stallholder who reminisced about how in the 1960s her grandfather bought a house here with no running water. She says the island is getting more popular but its slow pace endures: “There is nothing on the beach, no rows of parasols, you don’t have to buy anything, no commodities, it’s an escape from ‘bourgeois-ville’.” Splendid isolation indeed.