Fish of France

France is one of the few European countries bordered by the Channel, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at once. None of the three shares a tide, a temperature or a species list: you go from a tidal range of over ten metres in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel to a virtually tideless Mediterranean, and shore fishing bears no resemblance between them.

Inland, the Loire, the Seine, the Rhône, the Garonne and the Rhine drain very different landscapes. The headwaters of the Massif Central and the Alps carry cold salmonid rivers; the slower, wider middle and lower reaches are the domain of predators and cyprinids. The canal network linking these basins since the seventeenth century has moved species far beyond their original range.

The climate spreads the season out. Fishing starts earlier in the southwest than in the east, and one species may spawn several weeks apart between Brittany and Provence — the periods given on each page hold for a national average, not for a given département.