Mont-Saint-Michel | 23 Residents, Nearly 3 Million Visitors, on a Rock the Tide Turns Into an Island

By France's official count, the town of Mont-Saint-Michel has just 23 residents. In 2025, nearly 2.8 million visitors came to its rock in the bay between Normandy and Brittany, where tides rise and fall by up to 46 feet and, on the biggest tides of the year, the sea surrounds the Mont completely. So why does anyone still live here? In this documentary: how the bay and its tides work, the 'galloping horse' myth and the truth about quicksand, Bishop Aubert's dream of 708, the Benedictines and the abbey built around a granite summit, Harold and the quicksand in the Bayeux embroidery, La Merveille, the eleven-year English siege and the Michelettes cannon, the prison known as the Bastille of the seas, Victor Hugo, the 1879 causeway that nearly turned the island into a meadow, the German occupation and the American jeep that reached the gate on August 1, 1944, a day in the life of the people who work on the rock, The Old Map, the dam and footbridge that made it an island again, the monks and nuns of the abbey today, the Mère Poulard omelette and salt-meadow lamb, and what to know before you go. Sources include INSEE, the Centre des monuments nationaux, the Préfecture de la Manche / SHOM, the Établissement public du Mont-Saint-Michel, Henry Adams (Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, 1904), Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla, 1887) and Victor Hugo's letters (1836). Footage: licensed stock (Motion Array). Maps: Natural Earth (public domain). Archival images: Wikimedia Commons (public domain unless credited below).