The rocky island was connected to the mainland by a land bridge at low tide and was used as a fortress as early as the sixth century, then as a place of worship and a monastery in the centuries that followed. The close marriage of the church and the army is very visible there because it continued to be used as a fortification even when it was a monastery.
All over we saw signs about the dangers of the sand flats around the Mount. There's quicksand, the warnings said, as well as rapid changes in water level because the difference between low and high tide is very great. Yet as we climbed up toward the big church, we could see many groups of people crossing the sand flats on foot to get to to the Mount. Apparently it's a kind of pilgrimage. Hopefully each group had a leader to help navigate the quicksand areas.
Three and a half million people visit Mount Saint Michel each year, which averages out to almost 10,000 per day. As we got higher, we could look back at the causeway and parking areas, which illustrate the large number of people there that day. There were signs warning that some of the parking lots go under water at high tide. We were parked in one of them, but luckily we were planning to be away before high tide.
The big church and the cloisters (where the monks could walk) were at the very top.
The tide was coming in all afternoon, and the pilgrims walking across the sands had to roll up their pant legs to get across.
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