Explorer Nantes

Nantes Cathedral, dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, is a Gothic cathedral begun in 1434 and completed only in 1891. Its white stone nave rises 37.5 metres, and it holds the Renaissance tomb of Duke Francis II of Brittany and Marguerite de Foix, carved by Michel Colombe. The building was restored after fires in 1972 and 2020.

The Château des ducs de Bretagne is a moated castle in central Nantes, rebuilt from the late 15th century by Duke Francis II of Brittany and his daughter Anne of Brittany. Curtain walls and towers enclose white stone residences around a courtyard. The castle houses the Nantes History Museum, and a walk along the ramparts looks over the courtyard and the city.

The Musée d'Arts de Nantes is the city's art museum, founded in 1801 and housed in a palace built in the 1890s around a glass-roofed patio. Reopened in 2017 after an extension that added a contemporary wing, the Cube, and the former Oratory chapel, it shows art from the Middle Ages to today, with works by Georges de La Tour, Ingres, Courbet, Monet and Kandinsky.

The Passage Pommeraye is a covered shopping arcade in central Nantes, opened in 1843 and named after its developer, the notary Louis Pommeraye. It climbs a 9.4-metre slope between Rue Santeuil and Rue de la Fosse on three levels around a grand staircase lined with statues, and appears in Jacques Demy's film Lola.

The Jardin des Plantes de Nantes is a 7-hectare municipal botanical garden opposite the city's railway station, laid out from 1806 and opened to the public in 1829. About 10,000 plant species grow among ponds, cascades and an artificial hill, including some 600 camellia varieties, a magnolia planted in 1807 and a palm house from the 1890s.

Les Machines de l'île is an attraction on the Île de Nantes, opened in 2007 in former shipyard halls and created by François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice. Its Great Elephant, 12 metres high and built of wood and steel, carries passengers on walks around the site, while the Galerie des Machines and the 25-metre Carousel of Marine Worlds show other machines.

The Jules Verne Museum is devoted to the novelist, born in Nantes in 1828. Opened in 1978 for the 150th anniversary of his birth, it occupies a late 19th-century house on a hill above the Loire, where books, posters, models, games and furniture from Verne's own drawing room trace his life and his Extraordinary Voyages.

AccroCamp Nantes is a tree-top adventure course in the Parc de Beaulieu on the Île de Nantes. Wearing a harness, climbers move between wooden platforms fixed to the trees along rope bridges and other obstacles, on routes graded by height, from a course for small children to the full park circuit for those over 1.40 metres tall.