Notre-Dame de la Mer

Mass
or leonce-paroisse@orange.fr

Camiers is situated in the centre of the Natural Reserve of the Canche, on the edge of the immense beaches of the Cote d’Opale, and benefits from this exceptional patrimony.

The church of Notre Dame of the Sea has followed two older churches. The actual church was inaugurated in 1914. The porch opens under the church steeple, with a rounded arch opening, above which the tympant has a trompe-l’oeil decor  of Christ  surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists, and which, while seeming  to be mosaic, is in reality painted.  Inside the church the nave of five divisions has two chapels which form the transept, and ends with  a three-sided sanctuary and an axial chapel.

During  WW1 an English hospital was  set up in Camiers, and the soldiers who frequented the church assiduously offered two stained glass windows,  to Saint Georges and saint Patrick. Between the wars the veterans of the ‘Machine Gun Corps’ offered a third (Saint Genevieve) in memory  of their comrades who  had fallen between 1914 and 1918.