The Pink Granite Coast

The colour is real and slightly ridiculous: for a few kilometres between Perros-Guirec, Ploumanac'h and Tregastel the granite turns pink, and the sea has worn it into rounded boulders piled and balanced along the shore. The old customs path, now part of the long coastal route, threads through them for four or five kilometres, past a lighthouse built of the same stone and a sheltered cove where a small oratory stands in the sand. The tide changes the walk completely, opening and closing sandbars between the rocks. Offshore, the Sept-Iles are a bird reserve, with a gannet colony on one of them that can be visited by boat but not landed on.

What you actually see

• The granite chaos - rounded pink boulders stacked and balanced along the shoreline.
• The Ploumanac'h lighthouse - built from the same pink stone it stands on.
• The Sept-Iles - the offshore bird reserve, with a gannet colony reached by boat.
• Saint-Guirec beach - a sheltered cove with its old oratory left standing in the sand.

When to go

May to September, and specifically late afternoon: the pink only really reads when the light comes in low, and at midday under cloud it looks brown. Low tide opens more of the shore to walk. Seabird boat trips run through the breeding season and are cancelled in swell. Parking at Ploumanac'h fills by mid-morning in summer.

Honest expectations

The good stretch is short, and in July everyone is walking it at once, in both directions. Parking in Ploumanac'h in summer is genuinely difficult. The path is bare rock in places and awkward with small children. Grey weather flattens the whole effect, and the resort villages behind the coast are unremarkable.

Nearby

Tregastel and its own boulder beaches continue west; Lannion is inland.