Jules Verne's hometown and the city that built a 12-metre mechanical elephant from riveted steel that carries 49 passengers through the old shipyards where Verne's imagination was first ignited — a permanent art machine as audacious as anything he imagined
Nantes is a city of 320,000 (metro 960,000) in western France on the Loire River, historically part of Brittany, now capital of the Pays de la Loire. Les Machines de l'île (2007, designers François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice) is an extraordinary ongoing art project on the Île de Nantes — a 12-metre-tall Great Mechanical Elephant (riveted steel, carrying 49 passengers) parades through the old shipyards every day, while the Heron Tree (a 25m carousel of mechanical creatures) rotates above it. The Château des Ducs de Bretagne (15th century) houses a comprehensive history museum. Jules Verne…
Condevincum was a Gaulish city and Roman settlement at the confluence of the Loire and Erdre rivers. Nantes became the capital of the Duchy of Brittany (938–1532) before the Duchy's union with France. The Edict of Nantes (1598), signed here by Henry IV, granted French Protestants (Huguenots) substantial rights — a landmark document of religious tolerance, revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, triggering a mass exodus of Huguenots to Prussia, the Netherlands, and South Africa. In the 18th century, Nantes became France's most prosperous port through the Triangle Trade (slave trade): approximately 1,750…