Photo : Julien Thibault / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nantes
Nantes is in western France, on the banks of the Loire, about 50 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean. It is the prefecture of the Pays de la Loire region and the capital of Loire-Atlantique. With nearly 328,000 inhabitants in 2023, it is the sixth-largest commune in France, at the heart of a metropolis of nearly 690,000 inhabitants. The city lies at the confluence of the Loire, the Erdre and the Sèvre Nantaise.
From a Gallo-Roman settlement of the Namnetes, it became a seat of the Duchy of Brittany, then France's leading slave-trading port in the eighteenth century, a dark page of its history. The Château des ducs de Bretagne, the Passage Pommeraye, a nineteenth-century shopping arcade, and the cathedral of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul are among its key monuments.
On the Île de Nantes, the former shipyard site, the Machines de l'île and their articulated elephant illustrate the city's creative reconversion. Nantes was European Green Capital in 2013 and its quality of life has earned it good reputations, notably in a Time magazine ranking in 2004.
