La Verdoyante : Voie verte de Morteaux-Couliboeuf à Falaise

Paris between 1920 and 1950, as soon as December comes, crowds gather and line up outside the window of the big department Stores. With their noses pressed against the windows, children and parents look in all directions. Passers-by are fascinated by dozens of automatons. At Automates Avenue, visitors can travel in time and in space, dream with these fabulous window-actors and see a fairyland of past times coming back to life. The streets of Paris have been revived for 300 Automatons featured in 16 large animated original window stores coming back into action, as they once did, in an extraordinary setting.

Andre Lemaitre (1909-1995) was born in Falaise. Inspired by nature, this painter in the great French tradition, produced some 4,000 paintings mostly of the Normandy countryside between Falaise and Honfleur. Andre Lemaitre: a traditional painter This museum, dedicated to him in his native town, contains around 90 of his works and reflects his life and art in all its diversity. All four major periods of his work are represented in the museum.

The Battle of Normandy started on D Day - 6 June 1944 - lasted 3 months and put 2 million soldiers in a corner of France that had about a million inhabitants. 150,000 Normans had to evacuate their homes, with an estimated 20,000 killed, mainly as a result of the bombardments. The Falaise area paid its price. The dreadful fighting in the Falaise-Chamois Pocket which marked the end of the Battle of Normandy and the beginning to the rout of the German army, is remembered as among of the most bloody of the war. The Second World war marked a turning point with 30million combatants and 35 million civilians killed: for the first time in the history of modern warfare the civilian dead were more than those of the military. The acknowledgement of the military sacrifice and the need for rapid post war reconstruction, meant the fate of the civilian population was largely forgotten. But now, to remember and pay homage to these millions of civilians, the local government organisations of Falaise and its surrounding countryside, have joined forces to create a memorial to civilian life in the war. Set in the heart of Falaise, next to William the Conqueror’s castle, in one of the major buildings of the first stage of Falaise’s postwar reconstruction, this new museum tells the story of civilian life in the Second World War. The painstaking reconstructions, put together by the Caen Memorial, are put into context by the memories of those who lived through it all.

Come and experience history at first hand. Discover the castle in virtual reality with the aid of a touchscreen tablet. Falaise Castle is a solid stone fortress dating from around 1000. Built by the first Dukes of Normandy, it was enlarged after the conquest of England in 1066. In the12th century, William’s descendants built two square, typically anglo-norman, keeps using the foundations of the original castle. These buildings show the Dukes of Normandy at the height of their powers. They are most sophisticated of the Royal Dukes’ palace/keeps and best preserved of their fortresses in France. The virtual reconstruction breathes life into the palace, taking you back to the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. You go back to two different eras with the two circuits: The outside circuit shows you the first fortified enclosure and the daily life in the basse-cour (lower town) in the 12th century. You go inside for the real immersion in the history of the castle. Through your touchscreen tablet, the rooms of the keep appear before you as they would have been in the 13th century. You are plunged straight into the splendour of the Anglo-Norman court - how the people lived in the castle, how their lives were organised, what they all did as part of the daily life of a fortified castle. Images of the people who once lived here appear to tell you their stories with the sounds that accompanied their lives.