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Seaside that lives year-round

Coastal towns ranked by year-round life — the ones that don't close in November. Scores are anchored to fixed real-world ranges — method and sources on the methodology page. For a ranking weighted to your answers, take the three-minute quiz.

1. Marseille 3% second homes France's second city and its oldest — a Mediterranean port of about 886,000 in the Bouches-du-Rhône, with a national park inside the city limits, serious medicine minutes away, and no interest whatsoever in being charming.
2. Vannes 8% second homes A half-timbered harbor town of about 56,000 in the Morbihan — medieval walls with gardens at their feet, a marina at the old town gate, and Brittany at its mildest. The prefecture works all year, which is exactly the point.
3. La Rochelle 14% second homes An arcaded Atlantic harbor city of about 80,000 in Charente-Maritime — sailboats, a covered market that opens every morning, and some of the west coast's most generous sunshine, at prices the second-home money has already noticed.
4. Nice 14% second homes The Riviera's capital — a seafront city of about 350,000 in the Alpes-Maritimes, UNESCO-listed as the coast's original winter resort, with big-city medicine, car-free living, and the most organized American community in the south.
5. Sète 22% second homes A canal-cut fishing town of about 45,000 in the Hérault, called the Venice of Languedoc by people who haven't smelled it at dawn — real boats, twelve kilometers of real sand, and Montpellier twenty minutes up the line.
6. Saint-Malo 27% second homes A granite-walled port of about 47,000 in Ille-et-Vilaine, facing the biggest tides in continental Europe — mobbed inside the ramparts in August, stubbornly alive the other ten months, and never once too hot.
7. Antibes 34% second homes A walled old town with a real working city around it — about 78,000 people in the Alpes-Maritimes, between Nice and Cannes, with Europe's biggest yacht harbor outside the ramparts and the easiest English on the coast inside them.
8. Honfleur 28% second homes A slate-fronted port of about 6,600 in the Calvados, where the Impressionists learned their weather — gallery life, a Saturday market under the shipwrights' great wooden church, and Paris two hours away.
9. Biarritz 41% second homes A Belle Époque resort of about 26,000 in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques — imperial villas above the beach, wetsuits below, and some of the most expensive square meters on France's Atlantic coast.
10. Menton 43% second homes A lemon-growing town of about 30,000 in the Alpes-Maritimes, pressed against the Italian border — the mildest winters on the French coast, Italianate façades, and a pace closer to Liguria than to Nice.
11. Cannes 45% second homes The most famous resort name in France is, three streets back from the Croisette, a working market city of about 74,000 in the Alpes-Maritimes — with nearly two centuries of English-speaking life and prices to match the postcode.
12. Arcachon 62% second homes A belle époque bay town of about 11,000 in the Gironde — oyster boats below eccentric 19th-century villas, Bordeaux fifty minutes away, and a second-home share that decides what your January feels like.
13. Collioure 72% second homes An anchovy-and-artists port of about 2,800 on the Côte Vermeille, in the Pyrénées-Orientales — the bay where Fauvism was born, vineyards to the waterline, and a village that mostly closes its shutters in winter.