Pays de la Loire

Pays de la Loire is a region built around a river rather than an old province: it gathers Anjou, Maine, the Vendée and the southern edge of Brittany around Nantes, and its borders were left as they were in 2016. That patchwork makes it easy to underestimate, and quiet to visit. Nantes was the capital of the dukes of Brittany, and many of its people still feel Breton; Angers and Le Mans have their own long histories, from the Plantagenets to the world’s oldest active endurance motor race.

Along the Loire, Anjou has white tufa châteaux, troglodyte houses and wine cellars cut into the soft limestone around Saumur, and the stretch as far as Chalonnes is part of the Loire Valley World Heritage site. The Sarthe and Mayenne are green farming country of rivers, hedgerows and small towns, with the region’s modest high point, the Mont des Avaloirs, in the north. To the west, the Atlantic coast is a long run of beaches, the salt marshes of Guérande, the Brière marshland, the island of Noirmoutier, reached at low tide by the Passage du Gois causeway, and the Île d’Yeu.

Nantes, once a great port and now a lively, creative city, is the gateway. For a traveller tired of Paris, the region offers cycling along the Loire, oysters on the quay, boats gliding through the Marais poitevin’s green canals on the Vendée side, and seaside towns that are calm outside the summer peak.

• Tufa cliffs and troglodyte villages of the Saumur Loire
• Salt pans of Guérande and the Brière marshes
• Islands of Noirmoutier and Yeu
• Hedgerows and rivers of the Mayenne and Sarthe
• Canals of the Marais poitevin

Facts

• Its borders were not changed by the 2016 territorial reform; it has five departments: Loire-Atlantique, Maine-et-Loire, Mayenne, Sarthe and Vendée.
• Its highest point is the Mont des Avaloirs (416 m) in the Mayenne, also the highest point of the Armorican Massif.
• The Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000, extends into Anjou.