Belle Île

Archaeological finds from the Bronze Age suggest that the island enjoyed a large increase in population in this time, probably due to improvements in seafaring.

In 1572, the monks of the abbey of Ste Croix at Quimperlé ceded the island to the Retz family, in whose favour it was raised to a marquisate in the following year.

[8] The island was held by British troops from 1761, following its capture by an expedition sent out from England, to 1763, when it was returned to France in exchange for Menorca as part of the Peace of Paris.

Because of the upheaval from the conflict, half the population had moved back to the mainland and the abandoned lands were offered to the deported Acadians who settled here in 1766.

[citation needed] Lyrique en Mer/Festival de Belle Île[11] is the largest opera festival in western France.

Octave Penguilly L'Haridon's 1859 painting Les Petites mouettes ("Little Gulls") (1858, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes) depicts the island.

It was praised by Maxime Du Camp and Charles Baudelaire, who referred to the sense of the uncanny, as though the rocks make "a portal open to infinity...a wound of white birds, and the solitude!

Monet's series of paintings of the rocks at Belle Île astounded the Paris art world when he first exhibited them in 1887.

"[16] The island is the setting for portions of the novel The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, Alexandre Dumas père's second sequel to The Three Musketeers.

Dumas has his character Aramis fortify the island (in place of Vauban, historically) and Porthos dies there, in the caves of Locmaria.