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Photo: Harrison (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Several phoenix caissons and beetle pontoons from the 1944 Mulberry Harbour are still visible. One caisson is close to shore and you can walk to it at low tide. Out in the bay are two long sections and one short section, likened by Julian Barnes (in Flaubert's Parrot) to a Morse signal. These are interesting snorkelling and scuba-diving spots for their encrusting marine life, but watch out for sharp projections from the steel reinforcement rods.
The Mulberry harbours were two temporary portable harbours developed by the British Admiralty and War Office during the Second World War to facilitate the rapid offloading of cargo onto beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. They were designed in 1942, then built in under a year in great secrecy; within hours of the Allies creating beachheads after D-Day, sections of the two prefabricated harbours were towed across the English Channel from southern England and placed in position off Omaha Beach and Gold Beach, along with old ships to be sunk as breakwaters.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
360 degree footage of the landings on HD screens. Beware! It is a steep climb from the town up to Arromanches 360.
D-Day Museum
Fascinating museum with information about the Gold Beach landings, the war in Normandy and a comprehensive insight into the construction and use of the Mulberry harbours. Gold Beach was the central of the five beaches, assaulted by mostly British forces. The museum has shorter opening hours out of high season and is closed for most of January. The current museum, inaugurated in 2023, replaced the original museum, built in 1954.
This is really a military curiosity shop. Still, anyone who would sell off those bayonets, helmets and motorbike parts has learned a trick or two from the liberating Allied soldiers.
Museum covers the landings and also the first US transatlantic mail plane of 1927, which ditched near here.