The Loire Valley & Atlantic Loire

The Loire was a highway and a frontier long before it was a royal retreat. The Carnutes massacred the Roman traders of Cenabum in Caesar's time, today's Orléans, and Saint Martin, bishop of Tours from 371, made his city a great pilgrim shrine of early medieval Europe. In the 12th century the counts of Anjou became the Plantagenet kings of England: Henry II, born at Le Mans in 1133, ruled lands from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees and lies with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart at Fontevraud. Philip Augustus took their Loire provinces in 1204–05.

With Paris in English and Burgundian hands, the dauphin Charles ruled from Bourges and Chinon, where Joan of Arc found him in 1429 before raising the siege of Orléans on 8 May. The court stayed for a century and a half: Charles VIII rebuilt Amboise and Louis XII Blois, and François I brought Leonardo da Vinci to Amboise in 1516 and began Chambord in 1519, the year the painter died. The Wars of Religion ended the idyll — the Duke of Guise was murdered at Blois in 1588 — and Henri IV, who signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, took the court back to Paris.

Nantes grew rich in the 18th century as France's principal slave-trading port, fitting out more than 1,700 voyages. In 1793 the Catholic peasants of the Vendée and Anjou rose against the Revolution; the war and its repression, including mass drownings in the Loire at Nantes, killed well over 100,000 people. The 20th century added the Le Mans 24 Hours, first run in 1923, and the liner yards of Saint-Nazaire.

Touraine calls itself the garden of France and claims to speak the country's purest French, a legacy of the court; Rabelais was born near Chinon and Balzac in Tours, and the phrase douceur angevine sums up Anjou's gentle way of life. The white tuffeau limestone quarried for the châteaux left hundreds of kilometres of galleries around Saumur, reused as cave houses, wine cellars and mushroom farms, and the Cadre Noir, the black-uniformed instructors of Saumur's riding school, carry an equestrian tradition listed by UNESCO. Anjou's own game is boule de fort, played in slippers with lopsided bowls on a curved indoor track.

Downstream the identities change. Nantes was the capital of the dukes of Brittany, and although it has been administered separately since 1941 the Breton flag still flies there; the city has reinvented itself through culture, from the giant marionettes of Royal de Luxe to the classical festival La Folle Journée. The Vendée remains one of the most Catholic and conservative corners of France, and the memory of 1793 is kept alive at the Puy du Fou, whose night show has been performed by thousands of local volunteers since 1978.

Orléans has honoured Joan of Arc each spring, on and around 8 May, since the 1430s, and gathers traditional flat-bottomed Loire boats each odd-numbered September. Le Mans holds its 24-hour race in June and Clisson the Hellfest metal festival, and the Vendée Globe round-the-world race leaves Les Sables-d'Olonne every fourth November. The son et lumière was invented at Chambord in 1952.

The two regions hold about 6.4 million people. Nantes is much the largest city, with some 325,000 residents and over a million in its wider urban area; Angers (about 157,000), Le Mans (145,000), Tours (138,000) and Orléans (117,000) follow, then Saint-Nazaire, Bourges, La Roche-sur-Yon, Cholet, Laval and Blois, all between 45,000 and 75,000. Tours and Le Mans are close enough by TGV for daily commuting to Paris, while Berry, in the south of the Centre, is part of France's emptying rural diagonal and short of doctors.

The economy is broader than tourism. The Beauce plain around Chartres is France's granary, perfume and cosmetics plants cluster between Chartres and Orléans, and four nuclear power stations draw cooling water from the Loire. Saint-Nazaire builds some of the world's largest cruise ships and fits out sections of Airbus airliners; Laval is the headquarters of Lactalis, the world's biggest dairy group; Angers is the centre of French horticulture; and the Vendée, a county of family firms from Bénéteau yachts to industrial brioche, has unemployment well below the national average.

Life follows a provincial rhythm of morning markets, a proper lunch and quiet Sundays. In summer the river banks at Tours, Orléans and Angers fill with guinguettes, open-air bars with music and dancing, and the Loire à Vélo route brings a steady stream of cyclists through the villages. Local worries are the Loire's low summer flows and the old flood risk behind its levees, rising rents in Nantes, and erosion and flooding on the Vendée coast, where the storm Xynthia drowned 29 people at La Faute-sur-Mer in 2010.

Wine follows the river. Around Nantes, Muscadet is the dry white drunk with oysters; Anjou makes dry Savennières and sweet Coteaux du Layon; Saumur is known for sparkling wine aged in tuffeau caves and for red Saumur-Champigny; Touraine has the Cabernet Franc reds of Chinon and Bourgueil and the Chenin Blanc whites of Vouvray; and far upstream Sancerre makes France's best-known Sauvignon Blanc. Angers distils Cointreau, and Orléans has made vinegar since the Middle Ages, when wine that had turned on the slow barge journey was unloaded there.

Goat's cheese is the valley's other signature, with five protected names: the log of Sainte-Maure de Touraine with a straw through its centre, ash-coated Selles-sur-Cher, the truncated pyramid of Valençay, the taller Pouligny-Saint-Pierre and the small Crottin de Chavignol from Sancerre. Pork is slow-cooked into rillettes — a speciality of both Tours and Le Mans — and rillons, cubes of belly confit. River fish such as pike-perch, shad and eel come with beurre blanc, the emulsion of butter, shallots and vinegar created by Clémence Lefeuvre at her restaurant on the Loire near Nantes.

Sologne supplies game, asparagus and the tarte Tatin, the upside-down caramelised apple tart first served by the Tatin sisters at their hotel in Lamotte-Beuvron in the 1880s. Around Saumur, cave restaurants bake fouées, small hollow breads filled with rillettes or white beans. Nantes has the Petit-Beurre biscuit, launched by LU in 1886, and the rum-soaked gâteau nantais; the Vendée adds braided brioche and mogettes, white beans eaten with ham on garlic-rubbed toast; and the coast supplies Noirmoutier's early potatoes and the hand-raked sea salt of Guérande.

The royal châteaux lie between Orléans and Tours. Orléans has the cathedral of Sainte-Croix, a rebuilt house of Joan of Arc and long Loire quays. Chambord, François I's hunting palace of 426 rooms, rises around a double-spiral staircase in a walled forest park of 5,440 hectares, with Blois, Cheverny and Chaumont, host of an annual garden festival, close by. At Amboise the royal château stands on a terrace above the river, with Leonardo's tomb in its chapel and his last home, the Clos Lucé, a short walk away. Chenonceau, built on arches across the Cher and shaped by Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de' Medici, is among the most visited monuments in France.

Tours has the timber-framed Place Plumereau and the cathedral of Saint-Gatien, and is the base for Villandry's Renaissance kitchen gardens, moated Azay-le-Rideau, the fortress of Chinon and the abbey of Fontevraud with its painted Plantagenet effigies. Saumur's white château looks down on the Cadre Noir riding school, sparkling-wine cellars and cave villages; Angers guards the Apocalypse Tapestry, a hundred metres of 14th-century weaving, inside a fortress of seventeen striped towers.

Nantes pairs the castle of the dukes of Brittany with the Machines de l'Île — a 12-metre mechanical elephant walking the old shipyards — the Passage Pommeraye arcade and the riverside Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery. On the coast are the shipyards and submarine base of Saint-Nazaire, the beach of La Baule, the walled salt town of Guérande and the island of Noirmoutier, reached at low tide by the Passage du Gois causeway; inland, the Puy du Fou history park and the canals of the Marais Poitevin.

On the region's edges stand two UNESCO cathedrals, Chartres with its medieval stained glass and Bourges with its five portals, and Le Mans, with Roman walls, a Plantagenet old town and the race circuit. The hill town of Sancerre, the forests and ponds of Sologne and the Loire à Vélo cycle route fill the gaps.