My wife and I will be coming into Paris from Toulouse. After staying in Paris for 5 days
we would like to stay in Dinan and also go to St. Malo.
Can you tell us if 4 days in Dinan and day trips to St. Malo are too many days there.,
How many days would you suggest to stay in Dinan to experience this medieval city and to just
enjoy the atmosphere? We also would like to go to St. Malo. Are day trips sufficient or do we have
to stay there as well? Thanks for the info!
I would stay in St. Malo with a view overlooking the Channel. There is a nice beach there.
Four days would be plenty and you could day trip further than St. Malo. Have you been to Mont St. Michel? We day tripped as far as Quimper from Dinan and still had plenty of time to enjoy the town.
I spent 4 nights and Dinan and it worked well.
I think four days would be a lot of time for St. Malo (rather small and very touristy) and Dinan. I also liked Dinard, Rennes, Vitre and Fougeres. I used Rennes as a base for visiting Fougeres and Vitre.
Are you renting a car or going by train or bus?
Etretat is wonderful, and you can take a side trip to view the Bayeux tapestries, see Caen, and Honfleur, while you're at it.
The trip takes approximately 3.5 hours.
I think you can cover St. Malo walls, museum and shopping in a day. Roughly the same for Dinan's old center and port areas. Cancale isn't far from St. Malo and has the best oysters anywhere. Mt. St. Michel is a reasonable day trip from Dinan. Another I like is Ft. La Latte, an old castle that's been used and reused over the years and still has a lot of medieval flavor and charm. You can drive a little further west where there's a light house, cliffs and lots of sea birds. I'd only recommend it if you're a bird watcher, the light house itself is underwhelming.
I really enjoyed Saint-Malo when I was there in April on a Road Scholar tour. We were there 3 nights in a hotel on the beach just outside the city walls. We spent a full day in Saint-Malo and I did not have enough time to see everything I wanted to see. The group had an excellent walking tour of the old city but in my free time I only got to 2 out of 3 islets (tide was still in over the causeway on the 3rd one but got to Grand Be and saw the unmarked tomb of the writer Chateaubriand). I did see the cathedral where Jacques Cartier is buried. However, I also did not get to the 39-45 Bunker Memorial (just outside the city walls), or tour the Corsair's house (in French but the ones that went felt they were able to figure most things out), do the complete walk around the walls (got about half-way), or the Museum of Saint-Malo in City Hall or take the shuttle boat over to Dinard (some Alfred Hitchcock references in this village if you are a fan).
I was mesmerized by the tide changes here. It is such a huge swing and wow, it comes in fast. I walked on the beach once but sort of freaked out when I realized how fast it was coming in and that I wasn't exactly sure where the next stairs up were. I was fascinated by the public swimming pool they have on the beach that is covered by the tide. When the tide is fully in you can only see the diving board sticking out. According to the walking tour guide, it was built to teach those who were going to be sailors how to swim.
We just spent a few hours at Dinan. There were several buses full of high school age students visiting as well and the old city area felt very cramped.
I would actually stay in St-Malo as well, just to see how the tide affects the beaches and islets over time. So very interesting-at least to me!
We stayed in Dinan for two nights and visited St. Malo on one of those days. St, Malo was much livlier and more interesting and we wished we had stayed there instead. Two or three hours was enough for Dinan - yes, it is medieval, but it is quite small, not some French version of York. IMHO.
I should add that both are big tourist areas in high season. They will both be packed to the rafters in August. When are you planning to be there? I was there in mid September and, for the most part, things were quiet. In St. Malo, there were a lot of people walking but it wasn't packed. In Dinan, it was pretty quiet except for the market and many cafes in the port weren't open or had limited days/hours.
Dinan is a large modern city with a lovely old, smaller medieval core. Parking is an issue in both places in your subject line. Parking at St. Malo is likely not near a hotel, and the city is on a peninsula, making daytrips longer. Since Dinan can be seen in a day, I would not pay extra to sleep there. After evaluating crowds the month (?) of your trip, I would suggest you use your planned daytrips as a way of selecting your sleep location. You have not mentioned MSM.
