Published on : Tuesday, June 4, 2019
The tourist rush started in 1994 with the 50th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings, in which several veterans took pride of place for the first time.
In the following year, around 2.9 million people visited the region particularly to discover the legacy of the war, a figure that has risen steadily to nearly five million annual visitors each year.
“The first museums were created four or five years after the war, first by local collectors who gathered up what the soldiers left behind, then by local museums,” said Dominique Saussey, a D-Day specialist at the Normandy tourist board.
Later, the rise in war history tourism got a major boost up with the starting of the official Caen Memorial Museum in 1988, which now attracts around 370,000 people a year.
However it’s the military cemeteries that have drawn the biggest numbers for long time, in particular the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, where 1.4 million people visited in 2018 to honor the 9,300 graves marked by crosses or the Star of David.
The 22,000 British dead are spread across 18 cemeteries, and in recent times, the German cemetery at La Cambe, with 21,000 graves, has attracted around 450,000 people each year.
“For a long time we only talked about an Allied public, but now we’re focusing on a German public as well,” Saussey said.
20 percent of Normandy war visitors were British, 15 per cent Dutch, 14 per cent American, 11 per cent German, and 10 Belgian in 2017, her office said.
Tags: D-Day tourism