Photo : Selbymay / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Lac de Grand-Lieu
About ten kilometres south of the Loire and south-west of Nantes, the Lac de Grand-Lieu lies almost entirely within the commune of Saint-Philbert-de-Grand-Lieu. Very shallow, around 1.6 metres in summer and 4 metres in winter, it can double in area over the course of the year. In winter it is the largest natural lowland lake in mainland France.
Its ecological richness has earned most of it the status of national nature reserve, and it has been a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention since 1995. Some 270 bird species have been recorded here, along with about thirty species of fish, including the eel, and around fifty mammals. Most of the water is covered with floating vegetation. The small fishing village of Passay offers one of the rare viewpoints over the lake.
