Cité de la Voile Eric Tabarly — Attraction in Lorient

Went on a rainy day so obviously it was rammed, but taking that into account I'm not sure how anyone can recommend a visit here.

The concept is good, a number of repurposed or purpose built museums which all focus on sailing, or submarines as per the history of the port at Lorient. But, getting in to each one is about €40 for a family of four (2 adults, 1 child, 1 baby), and although there is a discount for going to more than one, I'm not sure anyone would want to.

The sailing museum didn't capture my eldest son's attention (age 6), it has too few interactive experiences and just not enough to justify the entry fee.

The outside space is completely unusable in bad weather, with apparently no provision for any form of rain.

All the restaurants on site are run by other companies, and completely independent of the museum. There is no 'snack' option for those of us that just want a light lunch, except for a creperie which didn't apparently need to fill its tables and turned us away despite the maitre de cleaning an empty table in front of us.

I really wanted to enjoy this museum and get my son enchanted why sailing, but on this basis there's no chance that'll ever be done by...

So much more history here than I realized! Invited to see the place by a friend, and knew nothing of the German occupation, the repurposing of their U-boat manufacturing sites. The museums looked to be great, had I known they were there I'd have planned more time so as to be able to take them in! The docks were open to walk along, and the variety of sailing vessels to check out was outstanding. Certainly they are more on the cutting edge of technology here - would be excellent if there was a way to try them out as a working deck hand, though from past experience sailing in France I'd guess it would be essential to have good working fluency in French to try it!...

There’s like four parts to the base museum and half of them weren’t open, the submarine part is only french and for each part you need a separate ticket. Entry to just the Tabarly part was 14€ each and the clerk told us it would take about two hours. We took our time but were outside again after 30 minutes and learned pretty much nothing. It’s probably educational if you know exactly zero about how a boat works. We felt kinda ripped off and the only thing that redeemed the trip was that we “accidentally” walked through a restricted section of the k2 bunker which was...