Calais is probably the first town you’ll get to in France, or the last if you are a refugee, but certainly not the first place you’d consider for a holiday in France.
Indeed, until 1558 Calais wasn’t even in France, it was part of England. And back in ancient times it hadn’t been particularly anywhere, it was just an island surrounded by swampy marshes and mosquitoes.
Calais has a long history of being tussled over between the English and the French. Even the Spanish took ownership for a couple of years at the end of the 16th century, and then the Germans moved in to line up their invasion of England in WWII. You can still see their bunkers on the beaches.
These days it is a busy ferry port, shipping millions of passengers, cars, goods and concealed refugees across the 21 miles of the English Channel to Dover. If the refugees get rumbled they get marched (not frogmarched, that would be racist) back to one of their makeshift camps near Calais.
I’m not really selling this place as a holiday destination, am I? Invasions, occupations, swamps, shanty-towns and non-stop, smoke-belching, ferries ejaculating a stream of noisy cars and lorries.
However, most of that takes place north of the town and some way from the pleasant beaches on the Calais coastline. If maritime transport is your thing, then you still get a good view of the ferries from the beaches. If getting to England illegally is your thing, then you can stare wistfully at the White Cliffs of Dover across the water whilst enjoying an ice-cream.
The modern-day Burghers of Calais have recently put a lot of effort into bigging up the town’s tourist credentials. I presume they finally got fed up with all the bad press around migrants, and all the holidaymakers’ Euros whizzing past Calais to be spent in the sunnier climes of the South of France.
The promenade has been redeveloped and there are plenty of attractions nearby. There’s even a giant dragon that goes up and down the sea-front. It’s a bit different to when we first visited in 2008.
We were a tad skint back then, and this was the cheapest holiday we could do abroad. Eurocamp have a holiday camp some 15 miles south of Calais at Guines. It is mostly used as a one-night stopover on the way to more distant camps, however we made a week of it.
We did get to buy baguettes, drink cheap wine and eat smelly cheese, but we’d only driven twenty minutes in France, and had it been 500 years ago we’d have still been in England. So it was only just ‘abroad’.
We recently revisited the Guines Eurocamp site in 2023 by way of a little nostalgia break for our youngsters. I say ‘youngsters’, back in 2008 they were small boys…now they are both taller than me, and they can swear better.
When they were younger, the campsite’s swimming pool, football pitch, crazy golf and ping-pong tables were enough to keep them amused. I don’t think we ever made it to the beaches of Calais. We went as far as Boulogne sur Mer (which we went to again this year, just to see Europe’s largest aquarium…much more spectacular now than it was then) and we also visited La Coupole, which was Hitler’s underground V2 rocket factory from WWII.
I don’t think the factory makes any V2s these days, there were none in the souvenir shop anyway.
So, on this latest visit to Calais we did do the beaches, and most enjoyable they are too. They are clean, sandy, broad and relatively hound-free…so perfect for expensive stunt-kite flying, which is my latest obsession.
As was the case in my running days, dogs are also the nemesis of the serious kite flyer. This is despite me pointing out to dog-owners, on many occasions, that the kite that their dog wants to play with/destroy is worth much more than both their hound and the vet’s bill they’ll face when I give its arse a good kicking.
I had rehearsed these lines in French, but I didn’t need them. So well done Calais, I heartily recommend the place.
For more of my uninformative guides to France click here.
JOHNNY SPANGLES - THE TIGHTFIST TRAVELLER 