Camping Côté Ô La Palmyre Quartier Privilège

With such a fine setup back at base, you might be reluctant to stray far. Staying close to home, you could bike over to Luna Park in a couple of minutes for fairground rides, rollercoasters and firework shows, or make a 20-minute cycle ride (10 minutes by car) through the forest to Zoo La Palmyre to meet the resident monkeys, rhinos and reptiles. If you’re after faster speeds on land or water, it’s a 10-minute walk to the headquarters of a local jetskiing company, for four-wheeled dirt and mud trails on land as well as and jetski japes on the waves. There’s a slower pace of life on the islands: try walking or cycling through the marsh and dune nature reserves on Île d’Oléron (25 minutes), or pottering around the castle-topped oyster fishing town of Le Château d’Oléron. Quieter and wilder still, Île d’Aix, accessible by boat from Fouras an hour away, is a crescent-shaped beach with a green centre sometimes flooded by spring tides. If you want to get historical, head over to the Matata caves (40 minutes): overlooking the Gironde estuary, this network of hollows among the limestone cliffs has been inhabited since prehistoric times. For something a little more recent, take a tour of the Gallo-Roman port city of Fâ (45 minutes) or the maritime museum in La Rochelle, an hour away.