On April 7, 2025, La Poste issued a stamp from the heritage and tourism series featuring the Marais Poitevin. Here, time flows with the flow of water. In a lush green setting, aboard a flatboat, the traditional Marais Poitevin boat, visitors glide along one of the canals that crisscross the landscape to form an immense aquatic labyrinth. While the "Green Venice" is the most emblematic part of the Marais Poitevin, it represents only a third of the 110,000 hectares of the regional natural park, the second largest wetland in France, stretching between Niort and the Atlantic. For the Marais Poitevin has three faces.
First, the wet marsh, with its maze of canals lined with alders, poplars, and pollarded ash trees with strange silhouettes that stare at the banks. Here, between stops at ports and charming villages, we celebrate the marriage of water and lush vegetation adorned in every shade of green. A radical change of scenery awaits with the dried-out marshland, where immense plains stretch endlessly out to the ocean, protected by dikes and crisscrossed by large canals. With the Aiguillon Bay, or maritime marshland, we see the endless ocean with its tides, salt meadows, and mudflats, a delight for migratory birds. The Marais Poitevin appears to be the product of nature, but it owes everything to the work of man.
Covered by the sea 8,000 years ago, it had become a hostile marshland. As early as the 11th century, monks sought to drain the land to exploit its soil. The abbeys of Maillezais and Aliénor bear witness to this past, where pharaonic developments were undertaken and continued for several centuries, resulting in the complex hydraulic system we know today. Between land and sea, between fresh and salt water, the Marais continues its history, passionately ensuring the preservation of the extraordinary diversity of its fauna and flora and the richness of this exceptional heritage.
