Explore Honfleur

The Vieux Bassin is the old harbour basin in the centre of Honfleur, dug from 1681 on the orders of Colbert and enlarged in the 1720s. Narrow slate-clad houses of three to seven storeys line the Quai Sainte-Catherine, and painters such as Boudin, Courbet, Jongkind and Monet depicted the basin. Today it is a marina surrounded by restaurants.

Église Sainte-Catherine in Honfleur is a church built almost entirely of wood in the second half of the 15th century by the town's shipwrights, after the earlier church was destroyed in the Hundred Years' War. Its twin naves have timber vaults that resemble upturned ship hulls, and its bell tower stands apart across the square.

Graville Abbey is a former priory on a hillside above the Seine estuary in Le Havre, with a Romanesque church begun in the late 11th century and dedicated to Saint Honorine. Its buildings house a museum of medieval religious statues and more than 200 models of houses, and the site is surrounded by a cemetery and terraced gardens with a view over the city.

Le Havre Cathedral, the church of Notre-Dame, was built mainly between the late 16th and mid-17th centuries in a mix of Flamboyant Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles, with a bell tower from about 1520. Badly damaged in September 1944, it was kept and restored within Auguste Perret's rebuilt city centre and became a cathedral in 1974.

MuMa is Le Havre's museum of modern art, a glass-and-steel building at the harbour entrance designed by Guy Lagneau's team and opened by André Malraux in 1961. Its collection covers five centuries of painting and is strongest in Impressionism, with works by Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet, Raoul Dufy and others; Henri-Georges Adam's sculpture Le Signal stands outside.