During the many years I’ve known my boyfriend, I have heard more about Nantes than most employees of the Pays de la Loire tourist board. It’s an understatement that the French city is one of his favourite places on this little blue Earth. Our trip to Nantes this month was therefore very, very overdue.
Nantes is a beautiful, friendly and quirky little place, filled with unique historical buildings, delicious crêperies and unusual cultural and artistic projects.
While many cities offer you a cathedral or a tall tower as their definitive landmark, Nantes offers you a gigantic wooden elephant robot. Part of the Machines de L’île cultural project, ‘le grand éléphant’ stomps round the island, squirting water in the face of anyone in its way. It’s bloody magnificent.
On Sunday morning we caught the boat to the colourful little village of Trentemoult, took lots of pictures of the bright houses and saw a couple of gnomes hanging out on a windowsill.
Le Nid, at the top of 37 storey Tour Bretagne, is a bar designed to look like a stork’s nest by graphic designer and illustrator Jean Jullien. A ginormous white stork snakes round the whole of the floor, the bar is located in its body and you can sit on the neck. The tables and chairs are all little eggs and those with particularly beady eyes can spy egg splats painted on the rooftops of the buildings below.
We popped in to Le Nid on Sunday evening to watch the sunset, have a cocktail and listen to music.
We wandered round the castle, visited the pastel pink LU biscuit factory and saw some of the Estuaire art installations located along the water. Le Pendule by Roman Signer is a massive old derelict concrete factory, that has been converted to a large clock with the fitting of a swinging pendulum.
We also visited a few of the city’s many crêperies, Au Vieux Quimper was my favourite.
On our last day, we went for a coffee at La Cigale, an extravagant art-nouveau brasserie. It’s filled with palm trees and has floor to ceiling patterned ceramic tiles. Beautiful and over the top and a great end to the weekend!
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A Ranson Note 
Wow! So gorgeous to see other countries. I hope one day to make it to places like this. Nice shots.
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Thanks for visiting my blog! I hope you do make it Nantes – it’s a great place! 🙂 xxx
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