Why go to nantes

Chenonceau chateau, built over the Cher river, Loire Valley, France. Beach day trips. Pier on Plage des Dames on the island of Noirmoutier, France. HAB Galerie. Breathtaking churches. Botanical Garden. Jardin des Plantes, Nantes. The Jardin des plantes de Nantes is such a fun space!

Enter for free, amble up and down the pretty pathways, and explore the impressive plant exhibitions and installations. Le Lieu unique.

This museum was founded in by master printer Sylvain Chiffoleau and typesetter Robert Colombeau, and has built up an astonishing collection of manual and mechanical printing presses. And if all that sounds baffling to you then you can take the tour to get the inside track on the printing industry in Nantes, and see how all this arcane equipment was used.

In the galleries you can inspect an engaging jumble of books, games, manuscripts, portraits, documents belonging to the writer and bequeathed to the museum by his heirs. You can navigate the maze of scurrying streets with brightly painted cottages from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The houses have a curious design, set over three floors, with the lowest used only for storage as the Loire would burst its banks regularly. You can pause there for a little while to identify all the landmarks below. The bar, Le Nid The Nest , is a nice surprise with seats and tables designed like eggs and a soft sculpture of a kind of stork-heron hybrid snaking through the space. Though there is hardly any industrial activity along the Loire River, the city is vibrant and clean, and filled with students, hardworking architectural projects and tech companies.

Nantes is widely known to rank high on the list of quality of life. That is why Parisians love to escape the bustles of the capital for this gentle and friendly atmosphere.

It will come as no surprise if you meet retirees from Paris when you visit Nantes. The city used to be well-favored bin the heydays of French royalty. When you step inside, you will find a delicately designed museum that takes you on a trip back in time to the Middle Ages.

A legacy of the s and s, when the city was a rich, lively river port, is broad boulevards meeting on impressive squares that are filled with cafes in the summertime. There have been new additions to the museum that makes it more elegant.

The Cube is a new wing in a semitransparent marble that houses works from Monet, Kadinsky, and Picasso. The major palatial gallery leads visitors from pieces works from the s to the s. This is not the only art presence in the city.

There are arty destinations through Nantes. Most of them are in the form of offbeat installations like the procession of massive rings at the Ile de Nantes waterfront, an island in the river, and their sensational glow that goes off in the river at night. The city spreads along the Loire banks, which sprawls as it courses west, its banks marked with fields and marshland until it touches the ocean at Saint-Nazaire, the lively port.

There is a spectacle here, a curved house in the middle of the river. There is also a yacht that seems to have dropped and melted at the bank. These are parts of the Art Trail of about 30 installations. Three art biennales have left a heritage of 30 monumental sculptures and installations as the river nears the Atlantic.

The artworks will take your breath away: a half-submerged house, a giant sea snake, wild animals climbing trees, a metal tower with a house on top that can be rented. The flamboyant Passage Pommeraye — a precursor of modern shopping malls, built in — may not be as famous as its peers in Paris, Brussels and Milan, but for me Pommeraye is the most beautiful, with its elaborate staircase, statues and ornaments that climb up three floors, leading to a maze of gilded galleries.

Shoppers can browse fashion showrooms, cake shops and jewellery or leather workshops. The vast building was abandoned until we created Le Lieu Unique in as an accessible and affordable cultural centre — a place for everyone in Nantes to have fun, and open daily from 11am to 2am or even 6am.

It was a success from day one, offering a cheap and cheerful restaurant and waterside bar, a bookshop, a kindergarten, contemporary art exhibitions and ever-changing theatre, dance and music events, many of them free.

There are even Turkish baths in the basement.