10 largest cities in France
Paris
Marseilles
Lyon
Toulouse
Nice
Nantes
Strasbourg
Orleans
Reims
Avignon
Roscoff is a French commune in Léon located on the north coast of
Brittany, in the department of Finistère. A former haven for
privateers and then smugglers, from where the Johnnies left to sell
their pink onions, Roscoff, approved as a “small town of character”,
is a small seaside town which has preserved its architectural
heritage from the 16th and 17th centuries. Its deep-water port,
served by Irish Ferries and Brittany Ferries, which is headquartered
there, provides ferry connections to the British Isles as well as
Spain.
Its foreshore, swept by tides with a tidal range of up
to 10.40 m, is home to a biological diversity specific to two border
algae ecosystems, the study of which, in 1872, is the origin of the
first European pole of research and development. teaching in marine
biology, the Roscoff Biological Station. Sought after for its
iodized spray and the mild climate maintained by a sea current that
varies only between 8 ° C and 18 ° C, Roscoff saw the birth of the
concept of a thalassotherapy center in 1899, with the institute of
Rockroum, and the foundation of a heliomarin center in 1900.
Île-de-Batz is served by speedboats from the old port of Roscoff.
Physical geography
Roscoff occupies the tip of
the promontory which closes the bay of Morlaix to the west. The city
stretches over 619 hectares north of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, 5 kilometers
from center to center, with which it tends to form a conurbation,
and has 14 kilometers of coastline with several beaches of very fine
white sand. . Access by land is from Saint-Pol by a single road, the
RD 58, the old national road, or from Santec, to the southwest, by a
small coastal road.
This territory is drawn by three points.
The one in the middle, the least marked, occupies the center of the
old town and is called the Pointe du Vil. The other two are, 0.665
miles to the east, the Bloscon peninsula, separated from the
previous one by the little cove of the old port, and, 0.604 miles to
the west, the tip of Perharidy, separated from the same by the cove
of Laber. This one, sinking for nearly two kilometers between the
peninsulas, is fully discovered at low tide. Its upstream third has
been a polder since 1835.
The Roscoff region, warmed by the
Gulf Stream and protected from the north winds by Île-de-Batz,
belongs to the privileged zone of the Golden Belt, this loess
outcrop thirty to sixty centimeters deep, formed in Devensien by
friable droppings and moraines from the edge of the ice cap, whose
fertility, although over a thousand times thinner, compares only to
that of the Yellow River plain. It is this loess, amended by the
magnesium of maërl and the phosphates of seaweed, which gives the
impression that the Roscovites, like Ulysses, cultivate sand.
Location and transport
Roscoff is 98 nautical miles, or 182
kilometers, from Plymouth, 210 kilometers from Rennes and 562 from
Paris. It takes 6 hours by ferry, about 15 hours sailing (but two
days in headwinds), to reach Plymouth. The Morlaix aerodrome and the
Landivisiau base are each around thirty kilometers away.