Fotografi a La Costa di Granito Rosa

The Côte de Granit Rose is a short stretch of the Côtes-d'Armor coast — roughly ten kilometres between Perros-Guirec and Trébeurden — where three-hundred-million-year-old granite comes to the surface with enough feldspar in it to read as pink, orange or salmon depending on the hour. Ploumanac'h is the heart of it: a shore of rounded boulders, some of them the size of a house, weathered into forms the locals have named for centuries, with the Mean Ruz lighthouse built out of the same stone standing on the point above them. The colour is the whole subject, and it is at its strongest in the last two hours of light, when low sun makes the rock glow against a blue sea; flat midday sun turns it grey and disappointing, which is why an afternoon booking here matters more than at most locations. Between Ploumanac'h and the Plage de Trestraou at Perros-Guirec runs the Sentier des Douaniers, the old customs path, about four and a half kilometres of coast path passing the Château de Costaérès on its private islet — a nineteenth-century granite house that photographs like a fairy tale and can only ever be shot from the shore. Boats leave Trestraou for the Sept-Îles, a seabird reserve holding France's only gannet colony, on Rouzic; only the Île aux Moines can be landed on. West at Trégastel, the Île Renote is a tied island of pools and boulders you can walk out onto at low water. Tides here run up to about ten metres, so the shore you photograph in the morning is not the shore of the afternoon — check the tide table before you fix a time.