The name Cherbourg-en-Cotentin is new. In 2016, five separate communes - Cherbourg-Octeville, Équeurdreville-Hainneville, La Glacerie, Querqueville and Tourlaville - merged into a single municipality of about 80,000 people stretched along the Channel coast at the top of the Cotentin Peninsula. The old quarters still feel like distinct places. Walk west from the central port basin and you cross into what used to be Équeurdreville without any sign telling you so; the shop signs change subtly, the streetscape softens, the housing gets older. Walk east, past the great arc of the Cité de la Mer, and you are in the old Cherbourg proper, with cobbled streets running back from the quay to a thicket of restaurants and the Place Général-de-Gaulle. The Cotentin Peninsula stretches out to the north, west and east of the city like an open hand, and Cherbourg sits in the palm.

Most visitors come in by ferry. Brittany Ferries runs the Portsmouth–Cherbourg crossing in about eight to nine hours (typically overnight) and the Poole–Cherbourg run in around four and three-quarter hours. Irish Ferries connects Rosslare in nineteen or twenty hours depending on the season, a long enough crossing that you wake up in another country. The ferry terminal sits on the eastern arm of the inner harbour, close to the centre of town as the crow flies but maddeningly distant on foot - the road loops around the basin. A free shuttle bus runs after each arrival, dropping passengers at the Cité de la Mer museum, from which the old town is another five to ten minutes' walk. Taxis can be summoned from the terminal if needed. The first thing most arriving foot passengers see is the soaring 1933 facade of the old transatlantic station - the Gare Maritime - which Titanic passengers passed through in reverse direction in 1912. Now it houses the Cité de la Mer's submarine and maritime exhibits.

Jacques Demy filmed Les Parapluies de Cherbourg here in 1964 - the all-sung musical melodrama in which a young Catherine Deneuve sells umbrellas, falls in love with a mechanic, and watches him marched off to the Algerian War. The film painted Cherbourg in candy colours and rain. Demy chose Cherbourg partly because it rains so reliably on the Cotentin (which it does), partly because the post-war reconstruction had given the town a clean modernist look that suited his pastel palette. The umbrella shop he used as the central location is gone but commemorated; locals will point you toward where it stood. The film made Cherbourg, briefly, the most romantic town in France in the imagination of moviegoers. Then the ferries took over the marketing and the Cité de la Mer arrived, and the umbrellas became a sweet historical footnote.

Cherbourg is easily walkable end to end, though the bus network handles the wider municipality if your hotel sits in one of the outer former-communes. A direct train runs to Paris Saint-Lazare in about three and a half hours; the line south branches toward Brittany and, occasionally, the southwest. Trains are infrequent and not always on time - the locals will tell you, with a Norman shrug, that this is to be expected. By car, you can be in Paris in six hours, Bordeaux in eleven, Mont-Saint-Michel in under two. Parking near the old town is paid and limited; the area around the train station is the usual fallback. Day-trippers based in Cherbourg make easy excursions to the D-Day beaches and museums on the east coast of the peninsula, to Cap de la Hague at the tip with its dramatic cliffs and (further inland) its famous nuclear reprocessing plant, or south to Mont-Saint-Michel rising out of its tidal bay.

Cherbourg eats like a Norman port should. The quay near the inner basin is lined with restaurants serving moules-frites, sole meunière, oysters from Saint-Vaast on the east coast, and the local specialty - a buttery cream of mussels often served with cidre from inland orchards. The old town squares fill with markets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The Cité de la Mer, occupying the old maritime station, is the headline attraction - you can climb aboard Le Redoutable, France's first nuclear ballistic missile submarine, and walk the corridors that nineteen-year-old conscripts once patrolled. The museum also commemorates the Titanic, since this was her last port of call before the iceberg. Up on the hill, Fort du Roule - the great German bunker the Americans stormed on 26 June 1944 - now houses the Musée de la Libération. From its terrace, the whole great harbour spreads below you, breakwaters and ferries and naval cutters and all.