The 60 best holidays in France for 2018
France summer booking guide
Planning a holiday to France? Read our guide to the best regions, including expert advice on where to go on the C?te-d'Azur and Aquitaine Coast, in Provence, Languedoc-Roussillon, Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy and the Dordogne as well as the best operators and booking details. By Anthony Peregrine, Telegraph Travel France expert. Click on the tabs above for our expert's picks of the best beach, villa, culture, food and drink, activity and cruise holidays in France.
We are reliably schizophrenic about the French. This is understandable. They are both our next-door neighbours, and hereditary foes. Because we live so close, their supposed foibles - arrogance, slipperiness, dubious morality - are amplified. And yet, and yet, we can't keep out of their country.
Clearly, and like a classy courtesan, France is so damned seductive that she lures us away from fiercely-held principles. You can see how she might. The most diverse country in Europe runs from celebrated mountains to the continent's finest coast via everything else in-between. Great rivers run hither and yon, forest covers 28 per cent of the landscape and there's hardly anyone about.
For roughly the same population, France covers more than twice the area of the UK. The few there are have filled the place with the first-class food and wine, chateaux (not all built to fight the English) and variegated culture. In few other countries can you go, as I did four summers ago, from a bull-running festival to major Signac exhibition in under 25 minutes. Villages remain complete unto themselves, rather than urban out-reach communities. They will have proper bakeries. The chain store might still be the ironmonger's. The mayor will take him(her)self very seriously.
As importantly, and despite (or because of?) its Jacobin impulse to centralisation, France has retained marked regional identities. The country covers the West European spectrum, from Flemish and Germanic in the north to Latin in the south. You can holiday in a different France every time you go. But how do you choose where?
Frances 20 most beautiful villages
You might start on the C?te-d'Azur, if for no other reason than that well-bred Britons have been doing so for 200 years. We were the first to apply manners, fashion and decadence to the natural splendour (mountains dropping to the sea; unfiltered light; creeks; you've seen the photos). Glamour remains - the Negresco Hotel in Nice, the Caves-du-Roy night-club in St Tropez - even though, in places, the coast fills up pretty full these days. (What did you expect? You'd have it all to yourself?)
The contemporary Azurean talent is, in fact, to project itself as an arty jet-set destination while actually catering for Everyman. Prices need be no more punishing than in Calais. (My favourite restaurant in Nice, the Voyageur Nissart, has full-meal menus from ￡14.) And out-running the crowds is a cinch. Head for the Corniches des Maures or de l'Esterel, or the hills behind Menton and Nice. The twist of a hairpin spins you from glitz to an older, rockier region where mojitos are things you spray against.
How to avoid the crowds in Provence
The same is true in Provence. It may be standing-room-only in the cultured A-team towns - Aix, Arles and Avignon - but you stand alone on the Lure mountain, or the Vaucluse Plateau. Naturally, the region slides easily into soft-focus - sensual markets, apéritifs by the pool, Sisteron lamb on a village terrace - but, at base, it's a hard-stone rugged world which has survived worse than tourism.
It's tougher yet, and the coast very much flatter, across the Rh?ne in Languedoc-Roussillon. No-one came here until the 1960s, when France decided it needed its own Costa, to stop French people going to Spain. Fishing ports were adapted uncertainly. New-build holiday resorts went up - notably, La Grande Motte, whose ziggurats and pyramids describe exactly what 1960s planners thought the future would look like.
Few would argue that all this is uniformly charming, but the sandy beaches are endless, the sea-food terrific, and few spots on earth have more happy families-per-square-metre than Le Grau-du-Roi or Argelès. The hinterland is quite different, vinelands ceding to sun-roasted hills overlain with garrigue and memories of religious massacre.
Meanwhile, the Aquitaine Coast - Soulac down to Hendaye via Cap Ferret, Arcachon and Biarritz - is also flat with infinite beaches, but pounded by the Atlantic. The power renders the Med idle by comparison, tossing surfers about gratifyingly. In the deep south, the Basques may, on occasion, be uppity - but they're brilliant when singing, cooking axoa veal stew or sharing their red and white villages, and green Pyrenean hills.
The north
Brittany, too, can get out of hand. It did so in autumn 2013, when almost everyone took to the streets to protest about pretty much everything. The Bretons' is a strong identity, fashioned by rocks, onions , the sea and the swirl of Celtic culture - itself wonderful when playing the harp and dancing, but frankly bonkers at its mystical extremes. Both north and south, but especially north - from the Pays-des-Abers to the Pink Granite coast and on to St Malo - the Breton coast stirs like few others. A word of advice, though: Breton crêpes are overrated. Go for the Cancale oysters.
It is a serious Breton regret that the Mont-Saint-Michel - the sublime rock-island abbey apparently landed from a more majestic dimension - should be just over the border in Normandy. But the Normans deserve some luck, after the clattering they took in summer 1944. Seventy years on, the D-Day beaches both retain an emotional impact and ring with the laughter of children, which is as it should be.
Pre-war, the Normandy coast was best known for the cliffs at Etretat - sculpted by gods with time on their hands - the Parisian chic of Granville and Deauville, and the presence of almost every Impressionist you care to name. Le Havre and Honfleur overflowed with Monet and similar. But my very favourite Norman slice is the inland Pays-d'Auge, where half-timbered villages punctuate the rich green, double-cream countryside, where there are cows in bountiful pastures, and calvados in my glass.
Deepest Burgundy
I relax similarly into the greys, greens and gentle slopes of Burgundy - "a landscape of slow civilisation," as someone once said, correctly. The region long ago retired from medieval eminence, both religious and temporal, to play to its real strengths: making great wines, raising Charolais cattle and growing a little portly. Being plump became a duty imposed by history.
Especially in the C?tes-de-Nuit and C?tes-de-Beaune, villages ripened by the wine trade seem in permanent readiness for a pageant. Some of the loveliest also line the Nivernais canal - as if painted into place - which makes Burgundy cruising an unexpected pleasure. Canal speeds are about right for the region, too.
And so, south-west to the Dordogne, which is not, as often supposed, a summer-house extension of the Home Counties. Granted, it gets many British visitors, re-taking, g?te by g?te, what we lost in the Hundred Years War. Try getting to Sarlat's Saturday market after 10am and, such is the pressure of visitor cars, you might as well park in Paris. Throngs of canoeists may also turn the Dordogne river into a watery M25.
But, as in Provence, a turn of the wheel distances the throngs for a mainly mellow landscape of old-fashioned farming, meaty meals, woodland and arcaded village squares. The place was by-passed for centuries by mainstream France - which is why it now looks so untouched.
That said, pre-historic men were jolly content here - notably along the Vézère valley, where they gathered in abundance, and not just to paint on cave walls. A few millennia on, so are we. But (another word of advice): please sort out your attitude to foie gras before arriving. In the Dordogne, it crops up everywhere.
The 60 best holidays for 2017
For our pick of the best trips, see our individual sections below:
Top 10 beach holidays in France
Top 10 activity and adventure holidays in France
Top 10 art and culture holidays in France
Top 10 villa holidays in France
Top 10 food and wine holidays in France
Tour operators
For advice on tour operators, see our individual sections below:
France summer holiday guide: beach breaks
France summer holiday guide: villas and apartments
France summer holiday guide: art and culture
France summer holiday guide: activity and adventure
France summer holiday guide: food and wine
France summer holiday guide: cruises
The first colour photographs of France
Getting there
Crossing the Channel
For cheapest fares, research and book on operators' websites, and for peak season travel book ahead, especially on longer crossings.
Read our full guide to cross-channel ferries to France
Eurotunnel (0844 335 3535; eurotunnel.com) The Folkestone-Calais car shuttle train service is the fastest way to cross the Channel, and services are unaffected by the weather. However, fares are generally higher than those offered by the ferry operators on short crossings.
P&O Ferries (0871 664 2121; poferries.com) Dover-Calais.
DFDS Seaways (0871 574 7235 (for Dover-Calais enquiries); dfdsseaways.co.uk) Dover-Dunkirk, Dover-Calais, Newhaven-Dieppe.
Brittany Ferries (0871 244 1400; brittany-ferries.co.uk) Portsmouth to Le Havre, Caen, Cherbourg, St Malo; Poole-Cherbourg; Plymouth to Roscoff and, winter only, to St Malo. Seasonal fastcraft services Portsmouth-Cherbourg; conventional ferries on other routes.
Condor Ferries (0845 609 1024; condorferries.com) Fastcraft services from Poole to St Malo via the Channel Islands.
By train
Eurostar (eurostar.com) operates year-round services from London and Kent to Paris, Calais, Lille and Disneyland Paris. A new year-round service also operates to Lyon, Avignon and Marseille. Through fares are possible from regional UK stations, and to many other French cities.
Voyages-sncf.com (0844 848 5848; voyages-sncf.com), formerly Rail Europe, can book trips combining Eurostar with TGV and local services, any rail journey within France, and French rail passes.
For all train journeys, book well ahead for cheapest fares - Eurostar's booking horizon is up to six months on major services (up to nine months for Disneyland Paris). Before booking, refer to seat61.com for invaluable advice on French train travel.
The best hotels in France
By air
Use skyscanner.net for who flies where and fare comparisons. Before booking, also calculate extra charges for checking in bags and so forth.
By coach
For often cheap fares to Paris, Lille and sometimes other French destinations, contact Eurolines (eurolines.co.uk), Megabus (uk.megabus.com) and OUIBUS (uk.ouibus.com).
Getting there advice by Fred Mawer
More Telegraph Travel expert guides