Explorer Villandry

The Château de Villandry, 15 km west of Tours, is a Renaissance château built in the 16th century for Jean Le Breton, a minister of Francis I, around an older keep. From 1906 Joachim Carvallo recreated its gardens on several terraces from Renaissance designs: an ornamental kitchen garden of vegetables in box-edged beds, ornamental flower gardens and a water garden.

The Château d'Azay-le-Rideau stands on an island in the Indre, south-west of Tours. It was built from 1518 to 1527 for Gilles Berthelot, a financier of Francis I, mixing French building traditions with Italian Renaissance decoration. Reworked in the 19th century by the marquis de Biencourt, it was bought by the State in 1905.

Place Plumereau is a square at the centre of the old Saint-Martin quarter of Tours. Known in the Middle Ages as the Carroi aux Chapeaux, it was named after town councillor Charles Plumereau in 1888 and enlarged in 1895. Timber-framed houses from the 15th century line the pedestrian square, and café and restaurant terraces fill much of it.

The Basilica of Saint Martin stands over the tomb of Saint Martin, the 4th-century bishop of Tours, on part of the site of a large medieval abbey church demolished after the French Revolution. The present neo-Byzantine building, designed by Victor Laloux, was built from 1886 and consecrated in 1925; the saint's tomb lies in its crypt.