If you click on the “Shop” button on the website for travel guidebook publisher Lonely Planet they will tell you that you can browse through 765 products. One of their books for this year is called “Best Beaches: 100 of the World’s Most Incredible Beaches” and when I saw that three of those were in France I had to find out where they were located. Recognizing that beaches aren’t a one-style-fits-all destination, the editors included themes such as family friendly, snorkeling, remote, crowded but worth it, and wildlife. We weren’t surprised at their first seaside choice for this country.

Corsica is nicknamed “The Island of Beauty” with reason and our trip there has given us plenty of reasons to return. Lonely Planet selected Palombaggia beach as “the Corsican paradise you’ve been dreaming of: sparkling turquoise waters, a long stretch of pine-fringed sand and splendid views of the Cerbicale islands.” The nearest ferry port is Porto Vecchio.

Moving from there north to Provence on mainland France we find Calanque d’En-Vau, which requires some translation. A calanque is a cove and in the old provençal language, en-vau meant “valley or down below”, referring here to being located on a southern tip of land near Marseilles. This beach is surrounded by limestone cliffs and can be accessed on foot or by kayak through the stunning water. The nearest city is Cassis.

The final stop is up in Brittany at Poulains that has both sandy and pebbly sections of the beach across which, at low tide, you can walk to the island ‘Îlot des Poulains’. I read that French actress Sarah Bernhardt spent some summers here in a stone fortress at the end of the 1800s to escape the fervor of Paris but all that remains is a seat carved into the stone wall where she sat awaiting a return boat to the mainland.

We don’t have a car so it’s always important for us to see if it’s possible to get to a destination by train. With the beaches mentioned above it seems that in Corsica we’d need a local bus, while in Brittany we’d use a regional train (TER) and we already have plans to stay over in Cassis to tour the area by boat to view the calanques. At the top of this page there’s a tab labeled “Topics and Tags” that will lead you to a page devoted to French destinations, including beaches, that are accessible by train.

Sometimes we get asked for our opinion about living by the water by people who are considering moving to France. An ocean or sea view was indeed on our original wish list but we abandoned that based on affordability and vibrancy or lack of depending upon the season. In our experience, cities on the Atlantic coast can be lively all year long with high real estate prices reflecting that. When we’ve been to the beaches here on our part of the Mediterranean coast, they have been shoulder-to-shoulder crowded in the summer and empty in the winter. We’re happy living between the ocean and the sea with easy train access to both.

Click here for a pdf from travel website Time Out that lists all 100 beaches.

Photo notes: That’s Nice across the top of today’s post and in the first paragraph. The 3 beach photos are from the tourism offices as noted below each picture.