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Le Havre

Le Havre, France, is one of Normandy's principal seaports, and one of the most important for Channel crossings to and from England.

Le Havre, 134 miles west-northwest of Paris, lies in the Seine-Maritime département, Haute-Normandie région of northern France, across the English Channel from England. Throughout the Middle Ages, Le Havre was only a fishing village, but beginning in 1517 it became the site of a fortified harbor and of much new architecture, including the Church of Notre-Dame, one of the few old buildings to survive the Second World War. The harbor was improved throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.