User:Mr Minchin/Drafts/Saint-Malo/Orginal/en

Saint-Malo is a walled port city in Brittany in northern France on the English Channel. It is a sous-préfecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine département.

Saint-Malo has 50,000 inhabitants, but that number can increase to up to 200,000 in the summer tourist season. With the suburbs, the population is about 135,000.

History
Saint-Malo during the Middle Ages was a fortified island at the mouth of the Rance River, controlling not only the estuary but the open sea beyond. The promontory fort of Alet, south of the modern centre in what is now the Saint-Servan district, commanded approaches to the Rance even before the Romans, but modern Saint-Malo traces its origins to a monastic settlement founded by Saint Aaron and Saint Brendan early in the 6th century. Its name is derived from a man said to have been a follower of Brendan, Saint Malo.

In later centuries it became notorious as the home of a fierce breed of pirate-mariners, who were never quite under anyone's control but their own; for 4 years from 1590, Saint-Malo even declared itself to be an independent republic, taking up the motto "not French, not Breton, but Malois". The Corsairs of Saint-Malo not only forced English ships passing up the Channel to pay tribute, but also brought wealth from further afield. Jacques Cartier, who sailed the St Lawrence river and visited the sites of Quebec City and Montréal - and is thus credited as the discoverer of Canada, lived in and sailed from Saint-Malo, as did the first colonists to settle the Falklands – hence the islands' Argentinian name, Las Malvinas, from the French Malouins.

Saint Malo was the site of an Anglo-French summit which lead to a significant agreement regarding European defence policy. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac stated that "the [European] Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises".

Sites of interest
Now inseparably attached to the mainland, Saint-Malo is the most visited place in Brittany. Sites of interest include:


 * The walled city (La Ville Intra-Muros)
 * The château of Saint-Malo
 * The tomb of the writer Chateaubriand on the Ile de Grand Bé
 * The Cathedral of St. Vincent

Miscellaneous
Saint-Malo was the birthplace of:
 * Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), explorer of Canada.
 * Jacques Gouin de Beauchene (1652-1730), explorer of the Falkland Islands
 * Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), mathematician and astronomer
 * La Bourdonnais (1699-1753), sailor and administrator
 * François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), writer and diplomat
 * Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), priest, philosophical and political writer