From Ships to Machines

Les Machines de l'île

A mechanical elephant and a living gallery inside the old shipyard halls.

You're standing under the steel-and-glass halls of the Nefs, the last sheds of the Dubigeon shipyard. Until 1987, thousands of people built and launched ships here. When the yard shut, the city kept the sheds and handed them to two creators, François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice. Their company, La Machine, builds giant moving creatures here, and you can watch the work through the workshop windows.

From the biggest shed, the Grand Éléphant lumbers out along the quay: 12 meters high, 8 wide, 21 long, 48.4 tonnes of steel and wood, carrying up to 50 passengers. Next door, the Galerie des Machines wakes a mechanical bestiary, from a heron with an 8-meter wingspan to the prototype branch of the Arbre aux Hérons, a tree the city later canceled. One activity costs 12 euros, 10 reduced, 8 for ages 4 to 12, free under 4. The halls are unheated and can close in extreme heat.

The site closes for a period each January, and the elephant itself is out for an overhaul from 2 November 2026 to 28 February 2027. Look up: the riveted girders once carried cranes over ship hulls. Now they carry an elephant.

Carrousel des Mondes Marins

A three-story mechanical aquarium spinning at the river's edge.

A 25-meter carrousel turns at the foot of the yellow crane, and it looks as if it climbed up from the riverbed. François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice designed it, and it opened on 15 July 2012. It is three rides stacked on top of one another, and its 36 moving creatures ride the seabed, the abyss and the surface. On the lower levels, children ride giant crabs and a manta ray, and the deep-sea creatures that first appeared one by one in the Galerie des Machines between 2007 and 2011.

The top level carries passengers in boats and fish above the parapet, where the wind off the Loire meets the music of the fairground. Delarozière has said the idea came from the island's old quays, the criss-crossed concrete pilings where traveling circuses once pitched their tents. When the ride ends, look across the water: the Musée Jules Verne sits on the far bank, watching the machine that borrowed the writer's imagination.