We tendered right into the heart of the Vieux Bassin – slate-roofed houses stacked like macarons around the water, sailboats bobbing, the smell of crêpes and Calvados everywhere. This harbor has been watching the world change since Richard III, Duke of Normandy, first put it in writing back in 1025. From these very quays, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville sailed for Brazil in 1503, Jean Denis set off for Newfoundland in 1506, and Samuel de Champlain organized the 1608 expedition that founded Quebec. For two centuries after that, Honfleur grew rich on trade with Canada, the West Indies, Africa, and the Azores – one of France's five principal ports for the slave trade, a history the town doesn't celebrate but can't erase.

Sainte-Catherine church stands like a ship turned inside-out – built between 1460 and 1496 by shipwrights who'd survived the Hundred Years' War, it's the largest wooden church in France, with a bell tower across the street like a lighthouse standing apart from its vessel. The whole town feels built by people who knew how to shape wood and read the sky.

But what really changed Honfleur – what made it eternal – was light. In the mid-1800s, Eugène Boudin was born here, and he saw something in the way Norman light hit water and stone. He started painting en plein air when that was radical, and when a teenage Claude Monet showed up, Boudin took him under his wing and taught him to see. They gathered at the Ferme Saint-Siméon – now a five-star hotel, then a simple inn – along with Courbet, Jongkind, Corot, Turner, Millet, Seurat. Honfleur became the birthplace of Impressionism, the place where artists learned to paint time itself.

Charles Baudelaire found peace here late in life, when peace was hard to come by. Composer Erik Satie was born in a house just off the harbor. Something about this place – maybe the tides, maybe the way the past sits so comfortably with the present – makes people create.

We had lunch at SaQuaNa – two Michelin stars of seafood that tasted like the ocean went to culinary school. In the afternoon we walked the Côte de Grâce for views over the Seine estuary, the same light Monet chased across canvas after canvas. The pros: feels like a painting you can walk inside, and the weight of all that history makes every cobblestone meaningful. The cons: tiny, so one ship fills it – but the charm and the centuries win every time.