IHT: Romance or a parking lot? April 25, 2013

MONT-ST.-MICHEL, France — A dispatch in The New York Times in August 1944 described the view of Mont-St.-Michel that American soldiers saw, “racing their tanks across the Norman hills into Avranches.” Built “for war as well as worship,” the writer noted, the Mont “seems to float on the sea as gracefully as a ship under full sail, catching all the changing colors of the clouds.”
But in the years since then, the sea has dumped tons of silt around the island, slowly attaching it to the land. The main culprit appears to be a solid causeway, built in 1879, that linked the monastery to the mainland but disrupted the movement of the waters. The problem was worsened in 1969, when the government built a dam on the Couesnon River to protect farmlands from high tide, but one result was to further reduce the power of the river to push the silt back into the sea.
For Henry Adams, writing at the start of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic churches at Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres were the sublime symbols of a medieval unity of vision, founded on God, which he contrasted to the industrialized confusion of his time. Those churches, he wrote, expressed “an emotion, the deepest man ever felt — the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite.”
When not jostled by crowds of tourists in the town’s cramped streets or distracted by the gift shops and ticket touts for private museums, a visitor can still feel some of that awe, especially at dawn and dusk, when the light spreads over the salt flats and the sea, or streams through the cloister and stained glass of the Abbaye du Mont-St.-Michel, known as La Merveille since at least the 12th century.
Despite its hundreds of steep steps, the abbey remains France’s fourth-most-visited national monument, the most popular outside of Paris, with about 1.3 million paying visitors a year. That is more than half the 2.5 million visitors who come to Mont-St.-Michel annually. At the abbey — where there are only 13 nuns and monks now — 55 percent of the visitors are foreigners. But the number of visitors to the Mont and the abbey is declining, down 9 percent last year, and the reason is not simply the global economic crisis, particularly acute in Western Europe.
A $285 million project to restore the sea to Mont-St.-Michel, and consequently to move cars away from its base to parking lots nearly two miles away, has created confusion for tourists. It has also created local warfare between businesspeople and the local government in a place with fewer than 90 voting, year-round residents that echoes earlier fights over the island between Normandy and Brittany.
The project to restore the Mont to the sea was first approved in 1995, and work started 10 years later. But it is only now touching the commercial heart of the town. Just this month, there were angry demonstrations at a meeting to review and revise how visitors are transported from the parking lots. Most contentious, the price of parking was increased to $16 from $11, which was already up from the $6.50 that locals, known as the Montoise, were accustomed to paying in the sometimes sea-covered lots at the base of the Mont.
The fixed causeway that blocks the tidal movement will be replaced by a curving bridge that will appear to float on the water. The tip of the bridge will be inundated by spring high tides for a few hours a few days a year, symbolizing the island.
The original idea was to leave passengers more than half a mile from the island, so they could walk over the oak planks of the new bridge and experience the sense of pilgrimage of the past. But merchants argued that the walk was too long and too slow, and that locals who like to come for a drink or dinner overlooking the sea would be put off.
Instead, the shuttles will come to within about a quarter of a mile, still requiring a walk. But the extra distance meant more shuttles and extra costs that increased the parking fee.
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www.nytimes.com/…/restoring-the-s…