Cabourg, Calvados Département, Normandy, France

🇫🇷 Cabourg is a commune in the Calvados department, region of Normandy, France. Cabourg is on the coast of the English Channel, at the mouth of the river Dives. The back country is a plain, favourable to the culture of cereal. The town sits on the Côte Fleurie (Flowery Coast) and its population increases by over 40,000 during the summer.

Geography Cabourg is located between Caen and Deauville, part of the Côte Fleurie. The town is on the Dives river, across from Dives-sur-Mer.

On 1 January 2017, the town was transferred from the Arrondissement of Caen to that of Lisieux.

History It was from Cabourg that William the Conqueror drove the troops of Henry I of France back into the sea in 1058.

According to Marcel Proust's biographer George D. Painter:

But the modern Cabourg began in 1853 with the arrival of two Paris financiers in search of a new site for a luxurious watering-place. The railway age had made the Normandy coast accessible to holiday-makers; Dieppe, Trouville and Deauville to the east had already been discovered; but here the adventurers found a virgin expanse of barren dunes and level sea-sands ripe for development. By the 1880s an unreal city of villas and hotels had arisen, in a semicircle whose diameter was the seafront, whose centre was the Grand Hotel, and whose radii were traced by a fan-work of avenues shaded with limes and Normandy poplars.

Culture Each year in June, Cabourg hosts the International Festival of the Romantic Movie.