No one area - and certainly no one city or town - in Brittany encapsulates the character of the province; that lies in its people and in its geographical unity. For generations Bretons risked their lives fishing and trading on the violent seas and struggled with the arid soil of the interior. This toughness and resilience is tinged with Celtic culture: mystical, musical, sometimes morbid and defeatist, sometimes vital and inspired.

Though archeologically Brittany is one of the richest sites in the world - the alignments at Carnac rival Stonehenge - its first appearance in recorded history is as the quasi-mythical "Little Britain" of Arthurian legend. In the days when to travel by sea was safer and easier than by land, it was intimately connected with "Great Britain" across the water, and settlements such as St-Malo, St-Pol and Quimper were founded by Welsh and Irish missionary "saints" whose names are not to be found in any official breviary. Brittany remained independent until the sixteenth century, its last ruler, Duchess Anne, only managing to protect the province's autonomy through marriage to two consecutive French monarchs. After her death, in 1532, François I took her daughter and lands, and sealed the union with an act supposedly enshrining certain privileges. These included a veto over taxes by the local parlement and the people's right to be tried, or conscripted to fight, only in their province. The successive violations of this treaty by Paris, and subsequent revolts, form the core of Breton history since the Middle Ages.

Even though their language has been steadily eradicated, and the interior of the province severely depopulated, Bretons still tend to treat France as a separate country. Few, however, actively support Breton nationalism (which it's a criminal offence to advocate) much beyond putting Breizh (Breton for "Brittany") stickers on their cars. But there have been many successes in reviving the language, and the economic resurgence of the last two decades, helped partly by summer tourism, has largely been due to local initiatives, like Brittany Ferries re-establishing an old trading link, carrying produce and passengers across to Britain and Ireland. At the same time a Celtic artistic identity has consciously been revived, and local festivals - above all August's Inter-Celtic Festival at Lorient - celebrate traditional Breton music, poetry and dance, with fellow Celts treated as comrades.

If you're looking for traditional Breton fun, and you can't make the Lorient festival (or the smaller Quinzaine Celtique at Nantes in June/July), look out for gatherings organized by Celtic folklore groups - Circles or Bagadou . You may also be interested by the pardons , pilgrimage festivals commemorating local saints, which guidebooks (and tourist offices) tend to promote as spectacles. These are not, unlike most French festivals, phoney affairs kept alive for tourists, but deeply serious and rather gloomy religious occasions.

For most visitors, however, it is the Breton coast that is the dominant feature. Apart from the Côte d'Azur, this is the most popular summer resort area in France, for both French and foreign tourists, and although the sinking of the supertanker Erika on Christmas Eve 1999 - the most recent of several similar disasters - dented visitor numbers in 2000, visible signs of the oil spill are minimal, and there's no reason for it to deter future tourism. The attractions of the Breton coast are obvious: warm white-sand beaches, towering cliffs, rock formations and offshore islands and islets, and everywhere the stone dolmen and menhir monuments of a prehistoric past. The most frequented areas are the Côte d'Émeraude , around St-Malo and the Morbihan coast below Auray and Vannes . Accommodation and campsites here are plentiful, if pushed to their limits from mid-June to the end of August, and for all the crowds there are resorts as enticing as any in the country. Over in southern Finistère (Land's End) and along the Côte de Granit Rose in the north you may have to do more planning. This is true, too, if you come to Brittany out of season, when many of the coastal resorts close down completely.

Whenever you come, don't leave Brittany without visiting one of its scores of islands - such as the Île de Bréhat , the Île de Sein , or Belle Île - or taking in cities like Quimper or Morlaix , testimony to the riches of the medieval duchy. Allow time, too, to leave the coast and explore the interior, particularly the western country around the Monts d'Arrée . Here you pay for the solitude with very sketchy transport, few hotels and few campsites. This last need not be a problem: Brittany is one of the few areas of France where camping sauvage (not in campsites) is tolerated.