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This island is also the natural center, in the absence of being the geographical center, of the town of Mont Saint-Michel, belonging to the canton of Pontorson, in the French department of La Manche.



The prodigious architecture of Mont Saint-Michel and its bay make it the busiest tourist site in Normandy and one of the first in France, with some 3,200,000 visitors each year. A statue of Saint Michael perched atop the abbey church stands 170 meters above the shore.



The numerous buildings on the site are individually classified as historical monuments (the parish church since 1909, for example) or entered in the supplementary inventory of historical monuments. The whole is listed as a Grand national site of France.







Mont Saint-Michel is a French commune in the department of La Manche in the Lower Normandy region. Located on a rocky promontory on a tidal island in the estuary of the Couesnon River, it owes its name to the abbey dedicated to the cult of the archangel Saint Michel (Saint Michael) and whose Latin name during the Middle Ages was "Mons Sancti Michaeli in periculo mari" .







Declared a historic monument in 1862, Mont Saint-Michel has been on the Unesco world heritage list since 1979. The UNESCO declaration also includes the bay and the old mill of Moidrey, located about four kilometers inland.

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