Quimper

Quimper is the Gothic Cathedral, the ramparts, important museums, the old lively districts, the animation of a city of shops and markets and numerous festivals all year round.

Fifteen kilometers from the sea and the most beautiful beaches of the South Finistère, thalasso, golfs, sailing, surfing, fishing, marinas ...

History: Situated on the river Odet, at the bottom of a ridge of about twenty kilometers, Quimper has always been a sheltered site and a place of passage. As soon as the Roman conquest was established, it was established on the banks of L'Odet, a little downstream of the present site of the city, a small urban center around a port open to the Mediterranean world. This activity will become a constant of the city until the middle of the twentieth century.

Learn more about the historical heritage.

The Saint-Corentin Cathedral, a jewel of Breton Gothic Art: It was in 1239 that Raynaud decided to build the present cathedral by building on the foundations of an old Romanesque cathedral.

Beginning in the 1850s, the architect Quimper Joseph Bigot undertook the restoration of the building, mainly the installation of new furniture, the decoration of the chapels and the ordering of new stained glass windows destroyed during the French Revolution.

Its most spectacular achievement remains the completion of the two towers with the construction of arrows between 1854 and 1856 financed by the Quimperes.

Since 1989, a restoration campaign has been implemented. Completed in December 1999, its restoration is a real revelation of the appearance of a cathedral at the end of the 15th century: restoration of the interior polychromies with reappearance of the ribs treated in yellow ocher and red ocher and general liming of the cladding.

It is a position contrary to that of the nineteenth century which had imposed on the cathedral an austere stripping far removed from the will of the first builders.