The island, or rather the rock of Mont Saint-Michel, 90 m high, with a perimeter of 900 m, was part of the mainland thousands of years ago. In the 5th century A. D. e. the level of the earth settled, and after 100 years it turned into a part of the land surrounded on all sides by water. Another 200 years later, in 708, a chapel was founded there, and in 966 - the Benedictine monastery of the Archangel Michael.
The remarkable architectural ensemble that has developed there since then has been inextricably linked with the unique natural environment. The miraculous and man-made complemented each other. But, since the 19th century, the bottom sediments deposited by the sea formed an extensive stranded in the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, and now, instead of 4 km, the famous rock is separated from the mainland by only a few tens of meters. A few more years, and the monastery would be surrounded by meadows, completely "attached" to the continent.
Among the reasons for such a rapid course of ordinary geological processes is the construction in the 19th century of a dam that connected the island with the land, and, at the same time, prevented the low tide from carrying back into the sea the silt and sand brought to the shore by the tide.
At the same time, polders appeared off the coast of Normandy - plots of land reclaimed from the sea, used as agricultural land. They also brought Mont Saint Michel closer to dry land. The construction of canals leading out of the Couenon River, which just flows into the bay, also helped to drain the strait between it and Normandy. The strength of its current dropped noticeably, and with it the ability to carry bottom sediments from the coast into the open sea. The last factor was the construction of a parking lot for tourists with an area of about 20 hectares at the foot of a cliff on a drained area of the seabed.
The current situation has long worried scientists and local residents. Almost immediately after the construction of the dam with a road running on top of it in 1879, the first protests were heard, and real projects began to appear in the first decades of the 20th century. But only now, after ten years of active research and testing, large-scale construction work has begun to return Mont Saint-Michel to the status of the island and preserve it as an integral natural and architectural ensemble.
The new project, which began in mid-June in the presence of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and four members of his cabinet, costs 164 million euros and will be implemented in stages over 6 years. It could have been realized in 3 years, but then Mont Saint Michel would have been closed for tourists at that time, and this is undesirable for local authorities.
The first stage will be the construction of a dam on the Couenon River, which will increase the strength of its current, and it will wash the sediments from the bottom of the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, thereby increasing its depth.
Then the existing dam from the highway between the island and the mainland will be demolished and replaced with a new structure, the main part of which will be a 1 km long pedestrian bridge. This will also mean that cars will be banned on the island, including for 65 local residents, and parking at the foot of the cliff will be destroyed. The bridge will not impede the ebb tide that carries sand back to the sea, which will keep the strait between Mont Saint-Michel and the Normandy coast as long as possible (although the natural process of shallowing off the coast, in principle, cannot be stopped).
