Saint-Malo
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Saint-Malo is a walled port city in Brittany in northern France on the English Channel. It is a a sous-préfecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine département.
Saint-Malo has 53,000 inhabitants, but that number can increase to up to 200,000 in the summer tourist season. With the suburbs, the population is about 135,000.
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History
Saint-Malo during the Middle Ages was a fortified island at the mouth of the Rance River, controlling not only the estuary but the open sea beyond. The promontory fort of Alet, south of the modern centre in what is now the Saint-Servan district, commanded approaches to the Rance even before the Romans, but modern Saint-Malo traces its origins to a monastic settlement founded by Saint Aaron and Saint Brendan early in the 6th century.
In later centuries it became notorious as the home of a fierce breed of pirate-mariners, who were never quite under anyone's control but their own; for 4 years from 1590, Saint-Malo even declared itself to be an independent republic. The Corsairs of Saint-Malo not only forced English ships passing up the Channel to pay tribute, but also brought wealth from further afield. Jacques Cartier, who colonized Canada, lived in and sailed from Saint-Malo, as did the first colonists to settle the Falklands – hence the islands' Argentinian name, Las Malvinas, from the French Malouins.
Sites of Interest
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Now inseparably attached to the mainland, Saint-Malo is the most visited place in Brittany. Sites of interest include:
- The walled city (La Ville Intra-Muros)
- The château of Saint-Malo
- The tomb of the writer Chateaubriand on the Ile de Grand Bé
- The Cathedral of St. Vincent
Miscellaneous
Saint-Malo was the birthplace of:
- Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), explorer of Canada.
- Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), mathematician and astronomer
- La Bourdonnais (1699-1753), sailor and administrator
- François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), writer and diplomat
- Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), priest, philosophical and political writer
See also
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External links
- http://www.ville-saint-malo.fr/
- Visiting St-Malo (http://france-for-visitors.com/brittany/st-malo/index.html) - English
- http://jersey.typepad.com/st_malobg:Сен Мало
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