Royan-area cottage, Charente-Maritime

The Côte de Beauté around Royan is the stretch of French Atlantic coast that Parisians overlook in favour of Île de Ré and Arcachon — which keeps a three-bedroom, ninety-square-metre cottage with a garden under two hundred thousand euros. The house is typical Charentais construction: single-storey, pale limestone render, low-pitched tiled roof, shuttered windows, with three bedrooms, a bathroom, a big living-dining room and a terrace shaded by a pine. A garden of a few hundred square metres wraps around it. It is a comfortable, low-maintenance house rather than a project, nine hundred metres from the sand.

The French purchase process protects buyers well: a compromis de vente with a ten-day withdrawal right, mandatory technical diagnostics, and completion before a notaire who guarantees clean title. Expect notaire and transfer costs of about 7–8% on an existing property, with completion around three months from offer. Non-residents buy on identical terms to French nationals and mortgages are available from French banks to foreign buyers. Annual costs are taxe foncière of roughly 800–1,300 euros for a house of this size, plus taxe d'habitation on second homes, which several communes in this area now surcharge.

Royan's beaches are unusual and excellent. The coast here is cut into conches — shell-shaped bays of fine golden sand held between low limestone cliffs and pine woods. La Grande Conche runs two kilometres in front of the town; Pontaillac, Nauzan and Saint-Palais are smaller and prettier. Because the Gironde estuary pushes warmer water along this shore, August sea temperatures reach twenty-one or twenty-two degrees, several degrees above Brittany. Sheltered bays for swimming sit within a few minutes of open Atlantic beaches with proper surf at La Palmyre and La Coubre.

Royan itself is architecturally distinctive: destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt in a confident 1950s modernist style, with the concrete cathedral of Notre-Dame at its centre and a covered market hall shaped like a shell that is one of the best food markets in France. Around the town, the maritime pine forest of La Coubre stretches for tens of kilometres, threaded with flat cycle paths, and the oyster villages of the Marennes-Oléron basin sell you a dozen fines de claire and a glass of white for under ten euros at a wooden table by the water.

The area works year-round. Royan has around eighteen thousand permanent residents, a hospital, schools and full services, and the surrounding communes add many more. Bordeaux is an hour and forty-five minutes by car with an international airport and TGV connections to Paris in two hours; La Rochelle is an hour and twenty; Cognac and its distilleries an hour inland. A car ferry crosses the Gironde to the Médoc vineyards in twenty minutes. It is one of the sunniest corners of Atlantic France, and one of the last affordable ones.