Culture Vultures....

We were enjoying Port Louis hugely, we had croissants every morning and a coffee every afternoon. We also spent an afternoon on the beach sunbathing and swimming. Generally being lazy and loving the lifestyle and many events of the Festival. When the sky eventually went a little cloudy we took it as a sign to get indoors and seek out a museum or two. First on the list was the Citadel itself that we had sailed past a few days previously.

It has an impressive entrance, with two separate drawbridges and a tidal moat. It actually has two separate museums one a maritime museum and the other a museum of the indies, which houses artefacts from the East Indies company founded in Lorient in the 18th century.

Also of course there is the Citadel itself which is well worth a visit in its own right. A perfectly preserved or should I say extensively rebuilt Napoleonic Fortress. Of course history isn't static and the forts history extend well into the 20 th century, being used by the Germans during the Second World War as an anti-aircraft battery and prison for resistance fighters. There is a moving memorial outside one of the walls to 69 resistance men and women who were shot en masse on that spot. The full story is illustrated in one of the many rooms within the fortress.

The views from the ramparts are superb.

Another set of rooms houses an exhibition telling the story of the French Sauvettage ( Lifeboat ) Service. Above is an early example that was originally based at Roscoff and was found on a beach at Dournenez and rescued her teak planking still in good condition after 100 years!

The history of the port of Lorient is very much involved with fishing and the East Indies company which largely built the town from the ground up, the diorama above shows what it looked like.

The company built hundreds of " Indiamen ", frigate sized trading ships that traded with India and China for silks spices and ceramics. Fascinating look into the past.

We woke up to bagpipe music, of course it was still Festival time. There were Scottish and Irish pipe bands playing on the quay.

That morning we decided to get a waterbus again to Lorient to look at the U-boat pens. During the war Lorient was the biggest submarine base on the west coast for the Kriegsmarine, Admiral Dounitz's red villa is still to be seen at Kourneval on the seafront.

There are three huge bunkers known as K1 K2 and K3, the K standing for the small peninsula  they stand on, Keroman. We arranged to go on a couple of guided tours, English speaking of course, our French isn't up to history lectures quite yet! Our guide was very informative and we began the tour by the slipways were submarines were brought out of the water then by some cunning engineering were slid into the concrete pens so as to be safe from air attack.

Safe they certainly were, the concrete roofs of K1 and K2 were 5 metres thick, the roof of K3 was 7 metres and was invulnerable even to the largest allied bomb the " Tallboy ".

After the war the pens were taken over by the French navy but remained largely unchanged from the war, you could easily imagine the wolf packs being refuelled and rearmed in these huge pens that almost felt like they were underground.

Lorient was the most heavily bombed French city during the war and was completely flattened, the only buildings left standing were the pens. Not because of inaccurate bombing but because the allies knew they couldn't be penetrated so adopted a " scorched earth " policy and tried to wreck the lines of communication by leaving a huge area of rubble surrounding the pens. It seems to have nearly worked as K4 is still unfinished due to the difficulty in transporting materials to the site.

Our guide was a glamorous French woman, who managed to make concrete interesting! The roof above her head is composed of concrete block with gaps which along with the space we were stood in made a " blast decompression chamber" effectively absorbing any bombs energy before it even got to the 7 metre thick concrete under our guides feet, clever Germans......

We now knew why Lorient was full of modern buildings. We had a very interesting day but it certainly made you think about the realities of war. The average life expectancy of a submariner in the Kriegsmarine towards the end of the war was three months.

As a final stroke of luck on our part we discovered the chandlers we had been searching for just a couple of hundred metres from the site, so we managed to order our charts for the south coast, we can pick them up Friday. So we have a few more days in this interesting city.