Gardens, Biscuits and Back Lanes

Musée d'arts de Nantes

A 1900 palace opened up by a contemporary Cube.

This museum begins with the arrêté Chaptal, signed on 14 fructidor an IX, 1 September 1801, by the interior minister Chaptal, while Bonaparte was still First Consul under the Consulate. In 1810 the city made one enormous purchase: 1,155 paintings, 64 sculptures and 10,000 prints from the collection of the Nantes diplomat François Cacault. The stone palace in front of you opened in 1900, and for more than a century it was the city's Musée des Beaux-Arts. The change came with the renovation finished in 2017, when the British architects Stanton Williams opened the old building up.

They added the Cube, four levels of contemporary art with a south face of translucent marble and laminated glass, and they linked the palace to a 17th-century chapel that now shows installations. Inside, the collection runs from the 13th century to today, and more than half of it dates from after 1900. The museum closes on Tuesdays and is free on Thursday evenings from seven to nine, and on the first Sunday of the month from September to June.

Jardin des Plantes

Seven free hectares of one of France's great botanical gardens.

You're inside a garden that grew in stages. It began in 1806, passed to the city in 1820 and opened in 1829. On 7 October 1860 the upper garden was inaugurated before 10,000 people; the whole garden opened on 9 April 1865. Its look is Jean-Marie Écorchard's work; he took over as director in 1840 and refused the rigid French style.

He raised a hill in 1848 with 500 workers from the national workshops, added a cascade in 1856 and a basin in 1859, and won the city over to English-style paths. Today it spreads across seven free hectares. Its stars are the camellias, around 600 varieties, the flower that became Nantes' emblem. Mayor Ferdinand Favre helped make them fashionable by filling the evening train to Paris with cut flowers, so women could wear one the next morning.

Near the path stands the Magnolia d'Hectot. The tree planted here in 1807 is accepted to have died; the winter of 1880 killed the garden's young trees, and this one dates from the 1880s, about 140 years old.

Lieu Unique

A biscuit factory reborn as a contemporary arts centre.

This is the annexe of the LU biscuit factory. When the rest of the site was demolished, this annexe and its corner tower survived. LU stood for Lefèvre-Utile, the Nantes family famous for the Petit Beurre, and in 1895 they built this factory on the quai Ferdinand-Favre in concrete and metal, an innovation for its time. By 1913 the site covered about 40,000 square metres and employed around 1,200 people, turning out more than 20 tonnes of biscuits a day.

Production left for La Haie-Fouassière in 1986, and the old buildings came down one after another. The city bought this annexe in 1995, protected it, and the architect Patrick Bouchain rebuilt it for a new life, keeping the industrial bones. The Lieu Unique opened as an arts centre on 30 December 1999. Inside now are exhibitions, a reading salon, a bar, a restaurant and weekend visits up the Tour LU.

The corner tower still marks the quay, but its top is a 1998 reconstruction by Jean-Marie Lépinay after the 1943 bombing. Tucked into a wall is the Grenier du Siècle, a time capsule of objects from 11,855 residents, sealed until the year 2100.