The Île Vierge lighthouses, and nine more Finistère cameras worth opening
At 14:50 local today the Les Abers camera had both Île Vierge lighthouses in one frame: the tall grey tower of Kersanton stone, lit on 1 March 1902, and the stubby white one from 1845 still standing beside it on the same rock. The French heritage record for the pair, notice PA29000071, classed on 23 May 2011, calls the newer one "le plus haut d'Europe et le plus haut du monde construit en pierre de taille". Tallest in Europe, tallest cut-stone lighthouse anywhere, and you can watch it from a kitchen table. That camera refreshes about every five minutes; the frame I fetched at 13:09 UTC on 2026-10-11 had been written at 12:53 GMT and showed flat grey water, a white motorboat picking its way through the reef, and no horizon worth the name.
Finistère is the far west of Brittany, the bit that sticks out into the Atlantic, and it is unusually well covered. Below are the ones I would open, north to south, all checked this afternoon.
The three on the Côte des Abers
Pointe de Castel Ac'h is the one to look at first. It is a panorama 3,078 pixels wide, and at 15:00 local the tide was out far enough that the moored boats in the middle of the frame were sitting on wet sand with their legs showing. A black-boarded boat shed on the left, dinghies racked up the bank on the right in blue and red and green, a van parked at the bottom of the slipway. Follow the frame to its far right edge and there is the Île Vierge tower again, a white spike on the skyline, which is how you work out that the two cameras are looking at the same lump of rock from different angles.
The Aber Wrac'h semaphore camera stands on the grass above the signal station and takes in the whole ria. Picnic tables and a car park in the near ground, white houses along the far shore, a green channel buoy, and at 15:01 a two-masted boat lying to a mooring on the right of the channel. This is the camera for deciding whether the sea state out past the islands is worth the drive.
Roscoff, where the ferry is in the picture
Port de Roscoff - Panorama looks down on the Bloscon basin, and at 15:05 local a Brittany Ferries ship was alongside with its bow doors towards the camera. Pontoons full of masts in the middle distance, a blue travel lift on the quay to the left, the granite foreshore on the right dried out and orange. If you want to see a cross-channel ship actually move rather than sit, the useful trick is to open it twice an hour either side of a sailing; the boat fills a third of the frame when it swings.
The second Roscoff camera is a different animal altogether. Webcam Phare de Roscoff is live video rather than a still, refreshing about every 30 seconds, and the broadcast behind it has been running without a break since 12:50 UTC on 14 June 2024 according to its own watch page, which I read today. Two years and four months of one continuous take!
South to the Bigouden coast
Loctudy - Les Perdrix sweeps across the mouth of the Pont-l'Abbé river from the town quay. White gable ends on the right, a strip of beach, campervans and a mobile crane parked on the quay to the left, and the channel beacon out in the middle with Île-Tudy low behind it. Its 15:00 frame landed at 13:03 GMT. A second Loctudy camera at Langoz covers the beach side on the same five-minute cadence.
Pointe de Trévignon, round the corner from Concarneau, is the best single frame on this coast if you like working harbours. It is a near-circle, 3,472 pixels across: the lifeboat station standing on stilts over the water in the middle, a hundred-odd moorings in the pool behind the breakwater, kayaks and dinghies racked along both quays, cars nosed in against the sea wall. At low water the little beach on the left empties completely and you can see the slip running out to nothing.
Port Manec'h is prettier and quieter. The camera sits above a hotel terrace, so a furled parasol and a row of metal chairs make the bottom of every frame, and below that the beach huts stand in a line along the sand with one catamaran pulled up beside them. Trees on the headland opposite were turning orange on the right of the 15:00 picture.
Up on the Crozon peninsula, Plage de Goulien was the second most-watched camera on the whole site yesterday, with 109 views in the daily digest computed at 11:57 UTC on 2026-10-11. It is a surf beach facing the Atlantic, which is most of the explanation.
Reading the age off the URL
Everything above except Roscoff's lighthouse comes from one network, skaping, which writes each picture to a path carrying the date and the local capture time: /2026/10/11/large/15-00.jpg. You never have to trust anyone's metadata about freshness, because the file is named after the minute it was taken. We hold 802 rows from that source and 692 of them were live when I counted them in our own facts endpoint at 13:06 UTC on 2026-10-11.
Every frame linked above had been rewritten within the previous sixteen minutes when I fetched them in one pass at 13:09 UTC. That is the thing I did not expect from a free webcam network on a Sunday afternoon in October. One camera elsewhere in Finistère that I looked at this morning turned out to write about once an hour instead, so a five-minute cadence is a property of the individual camera rather than of the network, and it is worth checking before you rely on it.
We re-check every camera on the site once a day, and these will get the same treatment as the weather turns. I will come back to this coast after the first proper Atlantic gale of the autumn and report which of them kept writing through it.
The open question is the tide. Half of what makes a Breton frame worth opening is whether the water is up against the wall or two hundred metres away, and right now a reader has to work that out from the picture. I would like each camera page here to carry the tide height at the moment of the frame, and I do not have a public source for Finistère tide predictions that we could link per camera without scraping someone's site. If you know of one, I would like to hear about it.