Visitor Information

Accommodation
Nantes is the biggest city in Brittany and has 120 hotels from which to choose. The Nantes Métropole Tourist Office offers an accommodation booklet which you can also download in electronic form from its website
www.nantes-tourisme.com
Spend a weekend in Nantes and profit from the offer of two nights in a hotel for the price of one -participating hotels and booking details are on
bon-week-end-en-villes.com

The card Nantes-Découvertes is an economical way to enjoy the city and its attractions and is available for 24, 48 or 72 hour periods (14, 24 or 30 euros respectively, children under 12 free if with parents). There is a 25% discount on the card if you are on the Bon Week-End package. The card also entitles you to free travel on all public transport in Nantes, including the excellent tramway system. One day travel tickets for the trams are good value - purchase these from the tram stops or from the bureau on Place du Commerce.

Places to see
The Nantes Métropole Tourist Office offers a wide range of guided tours with themes such as the Middle Ages, gourmet Nantes or Nantes and Jules Verne. Commentaries in English are available Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays in summer. Booking at the Tourist Office is recommended.
www.nantes-tourisme.com

LU Tower Nantes is famous for the splendid "Petits Buerres" biscuit factory which was built in 1909, the height of the city's industrial success. By the 1970's the second of the fabulous towers which adorned the factory was decapitated and the building disused. Reconstructed in 1998, the colourful LU tower is now open to the public and offers a panoramic view of the city on the "Gyrorama" - a visitor propelled turntable. The factory has become Le Lieu Unique, an arts centre with a full programme of music, dance, theatre and exhibitions, plus a lively bar/restaurant and bookshop. LU Tower is open from Wednesday to Saturday 1.00pm - 7.00pm and on Sundays from 3.00pm - 7.00pm, entry 2 euros or free with a Carte Découverte.
www.lelieuunique.com

Jardin des Plantes at Boulevard Stalingrad (Tram line 1, Gare SNCF) This is surely one of the most attractive of city parks and one which also happens to encompass rare plant collections, large numbers of camellias and greenhouses full of cacti. If you are lucky, you will find a leaflet in English, and enthusiasts can join one of the regular guided tours.
Passage Pommeraye at Rue de la Fosse (Tram line 1, Commerce). Opened in 1843, the Passage Pommeraye is richly decorated in the neoclassical style and is the antithesis of the modern shopping mall. Often featured in films, the Passage is now a listed historic monument and is packed with elegant shops.

Food
As a result of its historic trade links, Nantes has a mouth-watering legacy of sugar and cocoa-based foods like biscuits, chocolates and sweets. There is magnificent seafood, freshly caught and displayed in the Marché de la Petite Hollande every Saturday morning. And, because Nantes is essentially Breton, you won't be able to resist the piles of galettes, the deliciously soft brioche and the le kouing-amann gateaux. And not forgetting Muscadet, whose vineyards surround the city. Many châteaux are open to the public - follow the Route Touristique du Vignoble Nantaise or join a guided tour with free wine tasting.

West Coast Effect...Nantes

The western reaches of the mighty Loire represent not only a marked climatic transition from north to south, but also cultural and regional boundaries between Bretagne and Pays de la Loire/Vendée. Occupying both banks gives Nantes a foot in either camp, as if hedging its bets. Historically, though, the city has generally regarded itself as Breton while remaining outward-looking, its thoughts not infrequently straying towards the nearby Atlantic coast. A natural early centre for overseas trade, its pioneering links, particularly with the Antilles, have left their mark on the essential spirit of a city recently named the best city in Europe to live by TIME Europe Magazine. We just had to find out for ourselves.

Nantes is big; anywhere needing an outer ring-road stretching for 42km just has to be taken seriously. Quite how seriously becomes apparent on the long drive from la Périphérique into the heart of the what is now known as Nantes Métropole, the steadily rising energy level telling you all you need to know about state of the local economy. Nantes is booming. And not afraid of change, its current preoccupations including a highly controversial new regional airport study and a 350 Ha redevelopment of the Ile de Nantes, liberated by the closure of the port's once-legendary shipyards after the focus shifted downstream to the Chantiers de l'Atlantique, in Saint Nazaire.

Ironically, the island itself appears on the map like a vast ship moored in mid-stream. Enter by car from the south and, apart from a couple of bridges, you're barely aware of its insularity, but stand on the currently deserted quays and look across to the bustling urban scene on the opposite bank and you suddenly get a very different impression. This sense of detachment proves a fitting location for the startling new Palais de Justice created by architect Jean Nouvel, its geometrical glass and ironwork structure and monotone colour scheme adding a note of token sobriety to something actually much more interesting. Inside lies a soaring vestibule framed by columns displaying vertically-scrolling electronic quotations from human rights luminaries, while beyond are the individual courts. These dark boxes-within-a-box are further enclosed by full-height metal screening - here both guilty and innocent alike are going to find themselves behind bars.

The building, a flagship project for the island, gazes across the river, where the former quays (like those of the island) are cantilevered out from the riverbed on a faded framework of concrete spars. Crossing the river on the shiny, modern Passerelle Victor Schoelcher footbridge provides an opportunity to take in the bigger picture from midstream, including the elegant 18th Century facades lining the Quai de la Fosse. Once across a closer look reveals a remarkable collection of figurehead corbels or mascarons, trademarks of their wealthy ship-owner constructors, who also added the finest quality wrought ironwork balustrades. No expense, it seems, was spared. Three centuries later, however, there's another, more unnerving feature: many of the buildings are actually leaning at crazy angles. So much so, in fact, that the windows and doors have had to be realigned to cope with the changes. Curious.

Discovering just how this came about reveals a remarkable story which begins at the time of the boom in overseas trade, when Nantes' square-riggers, returning from their long voyages to discharge cargoes of Caribbean spices, coffee, cotton, indigo and sugar. At the time Nantes possessed not one island but many, regarding itself, with some justification, as the Venice of France, and analogy which also encompassed the Italian's favoured technique of sinking massive oak piles into the riverbanks to stabilise the waterlogged terrain prior to building. Not surprisingly, the sites were soon snapped up for development by the ship-owners, who were able to keep a constant eye on proceedings at the quayside without leaving their sumptuous private residences. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. The combined weight of granite street-level masonry topped with a further four storeys in limestone ultimately proved too much for the minimal foundations, and the mighty façades began to sink, only the buttressing effect of their terraced construction sparing them the final indignity of actual collapse. Addressing the underlying problem, though, would require drastic measures and a little patience.

As it turned out, they did not have too long to wait. As the city grew, so did the inconvenience, for its inhabitants, of getting around it via an inefficient network of bridges and waterways. Unlike Venice, whose advantages had always outweighed its problems, Nantes began filling in its own channels (thereby finally consolidating the wayward subsoil) until by the mid-19th Century just a handful were left. Now only the Loire remains, along with the River Erdre (part of which flows beneath the city in a tunnel), leaving districts like the Ile Feydeau and a few Quai signs to provide additional poignant reminders of Nantes' seafaring Age d'Or.

No matter. Nantes was set up, apparently comfortable with the wealth it had amassed, and had a rich legacy of neo-Classical and Renaissance architecture which breathed new life into the old, mostly medieval city. Now the architecture itself may feel like a refined survivor from a more elegant period, but at the time of its construction was considered daring, finding its ultimate expression in the now legendary Passage Pommeraye. This dazzling neo-Classical extravaganza was created by local architects J B Buron and H Durand-Gasselin for prominent solicitor Louis Pommeraye, who dreamed of linking the port area with the upper city via a three-storey shopping arcade. The design incorporates cast-iron and oak escaliers, Corinthian columns and allegorical statuary, beneath an atrium-style canopy of glass and wrought ironwork. Even if it virtually bankrupted its developer, there's no doubt that he got his money's-worth, and the unique arcade remains one of the showpieces of Nantes.

Not far from the upper exit lies another, the celebrated Cigale brasserie, whose jewel box 1900s Art Nouveau interior earned it a Monument Historique listing and continues to pack in diners eager to experience the best seats in town. It's also a total contrast to my next visit, the appropriately-named Lieu Unique, a distinctly shab-chic cultural centre created in the shell of a former biscuit factory. After the LU company moved elsewhere the buildings stood empty for years, but ultimately save them from demolition in order to retain one of the company's two prominent Belle Époque towers. Now the Tour LU has been painstakingly restored to its former glory (a process which involved replicating its lost cupola) and open to visitors. A new iron staircase winds its vertiginous way around a central lift-shaft to reach the summit, where an audio-visual presentation tells the history of the company, the factory and its restoration. A further neat touch is the 'Gyrorama' - a hand-cranked revolving viewing platform allowing visitors to take in a panoramic views of the river and city skyline. The results, while not exactly in the Canaletto league, do provide the big picture of a city which at ground level can sometimes feel confusing. Maybe it's simply a matter of the sheer size of the place, or the sense of continuing change. Either way, there's a lot to see, so I continue exploring, by making for the biggest thing in sight.

The Cathédrale de St Pierre et St Paul (although no-one, curiously, ever mentions the latter) still just about holds that particular distinction, and looks even more impressive since emerging from a lengthy campaign of restoration to remove the grime of centuries. The vast structure was begun in 1434 and took 450 years to complete, progressing from west to east (unlike other medieval Gothic cathedrals) until it pierced the adjacent old city walls. Another feature unique in France is an external pulpit, while inside I also discover a well. There's also little to indicate the extended construction period, and since very little of the original stained glass survived the ravages of two world wars, the whole interior is filled with daylight. Beside the southern portal I pause beside the 16th Century marble tomb of François II and his wife Marguerite de Foix, flanked by four statues representing the virtues. Much has happened in this, the greatest cathedral in Brittany, including the signing on 13th April, 1598 of the Edict of Nantes, formalising equality of Catholics and Protestants.
For all its popular image of a vibrant and environmentally-aware city with a great future, it's unsurprising that Nantes maintains a healthy respect for its historic past, a fact which is due to be underlined in 2006 by the high-profile re-opening of the Château of the Ducs de Bretagne, after a marathon 20 year campaign of restoration. And right now there's an air of expectation in the city, and it's infectious. One thing is certain: exciting times lie ahead.

© Words and pictures Roger Moss
A version of this feature first appeared in everything France magazine Issue 33

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