The château de la Hunaudaye hands its Taverne over to visitors for one sitting of the festival Les Minutes Bleues. Each team pits its knowledge against the others and calls on creativity, exploration and strategy. Shakers in hand, the players mix the best breuvage sans alcool they can manage. The team that comes out ahead is declared Tavernier du château. The festival opens the hauts-lieux of Côtes d’Armor under the blue light of dawn or dusk.
Region: Brittany
Visite de l’atelier Maïma Couture, à Pont-Croix
Maïma Couture keeps a craft workshop in Pont-Croix, a Petite Cité de Caractère of the Cap Sizun. From its bench come clothes and accessories made of material that is 99,99% upcyclés. The tour goes behind the scenes of a sewing workshop brimming with life and fabrics. It belongs to the savoir-faire weeks of the Federation of Brittany Tourist Offices, and part of the takings goes to the Fondation du Patrimoine de Bretagne.
Pas après pas, son après son at La Hunaudaye
A 3 km walk sets out from the Château de la Hunaudaye at Plédéliac to meet the autumn sunrise. An immersive sound experience runs alongside the route, so the light and the sound arrive together. The group is capped at 20 walkers and the outing is open from the age of 8. It is one rendez-vous of the 5th Minutes Bleues, the Côtes d’Armor festival that opens 24 sites of natural and cultural patrimoine in the blue light of dawn or dusk.
La Baie des Livres, salon jeunesse du Pays de Morlaix
The association La Baie des Livres gathers children’s books and illustration at the Roudour hall in Saint-Martin-des-Champs, and its fifteenth edition turns on Gourmandises. An exhibition of Les recettes des contes de fées and another devoted to François Place hang beside the signing stands. Kamishibaï readings, comptines and an Alfajores workshop fill the halls. A Causerie en breton carries the Breton tongue through this Pays de Morlaix fair.
Le Vieux Bourg butter works, Plœuc-L’Hermitage
Butter is the gold of the Breton larder, and at Le Vieux Bourg it is still churned in one farmhouse workshop. Arnaud takes visitors into the production room and, depending on what is being made that day, walks them through the steps that turn milk into refined butter. The round ends at the tasting bench. The flavoured butters carry Breton notes, buckwheat among them, from a farm trade that once topped up the income of the region’s smallholders.
Il était une fois Bon-Repos, balade contée à l’abbaye
A told walk through the Abbaye de Bon-Repos, run by the Association des Compagnons de l’Abbaye de Bon-Repos. A story, a sound and a making moment carry the house’s own history into the dark. The senses do the work, not a commentary, and families with young children are who it is built for. The walk sits inside Les Minutes Bleues, the festival that opens the Côtes d’Armor’s natural and cultural high places under blue light at dawn and dusk.
Tout est bon dans Le Breton !, a bigoudène duel
Maiween and Marie-Yvonne are billed as the last two bigoudènes of their region, and they are fighting over the right to carry l’esprit bigouden to the ONU. The Comédie du Finistère sets the quarrel on the small port of Guilvinec, where the pair feed Kouign-Amann to the gulls. It gets settled by contests: the sturdiest crêpe, a Gavotte danced in the Fest-Noz, the biggest haul of bigorneaux. The company signs the result a comédie armoricaine.
Visite flash: the Bretons and the stone giants
A short mediated sequence at the Musée de Préhistoire de Carnac, turning from the stones themselves to what the Bretons made of them. Between reality and imagination, the mediator shows how the megaliths have inspired artists and advertisers. The museum holds one of the richest prehistoric collections in Europe, with 3000 objects from excavations at Carnac and nearby. The alignments themselves run for 4 kilometres. No booking is needed.
Les secrets du lin à l’hôtel des de Gaspern
Sidonie & Compagnie opens its doors around flax, one sitting of the Semaine du Tourisme Economique et des Savoir-Faire in Guingamp. Visitors push open the doors of the hôtel des de Gaspern, in the heart of the town, where the plant’s many faces are unfolded. Charlotte, a naturopathe working there, draws out what flax offers for wellbeing. The visit closes over a sweet creation that each person makes.
Quand l’Antiquité défie vos sens, à Coriosolis
The ArchéoMusée Coriosolis opens to a small booked group at the close of the blue hour. Its three immersive rooms are met by smell, touch and sound, not by labels. Corseul was the antique capital of the Coriosolites, and the collections come from digs on that territory. A headset sets the visitor beside Lelius, a young coriosolite, at a ceremony in the great sanctuary whose ruins stand on the site.