Arromanches-les-Bains & Mulberry Harbour Remains

Arromanches-les-Bains is a small Calvados resort town best known as the site of one of the most audacious engineering operations in WWII history. Following the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, the Allies towed prefabricated components across the English Channel — concrete caissons, floating piers, and breakwaters — to assemble two artificial Mulberry harbours within days of the landings. The British harbour at Arromanches (Mulberry B) remained operational for six months, supplying approximately two and a half million men, half a million vehicles, and four million tonnes of supplies. Remains of the harbour — concrete caissons the size of apartment blocks — still sit offshore, visible from the town beach and most dramatically from the clifftop to the east. The Musée du Débarquement on the seafront tells the full story with scale models, original equipment, maps, and film footage. A second attraction, Arromanches 360, occupies a circular cinema on the clifftop above the beach and shows a nine-screen circular film combining archive D-Day footage with contemporary images of the same landscape. The clifftop viewpoint above the 360 cinema offers the most comprehensive overview of the offshore remains. Low tide reveals significantly more of the caissons than high tide. The town is also the southern terminus of a panoramic clifftop path connecting to the nearby Canadian Juno Beach sites. Allow two to three hours for the town, museum, 360 cinema, and clifftop viewpoint.