Stone and Timber: Old Nantes

Château des ducs de Bretagne

Free ramparts, a moat garden and a white palace courtyard.

You're standing on the free ramparts of the Château des ducs de Bretagne, and up here you can see how the building keeps a secret. The outside is a fortress: courses of granite and schist, a wide moat, towers built to shrug off cannon. But the courtyard below is a palace. Step through the gate and the stone turns white.

The ducal residence is dressed in pale tuffeau, carved in the late flamboyant Gothic style, and its one true Renaissance flourish is the set of Italian loggias at the top of the Tour de la Couronne d'Or. François II began this castle in the 1460s as a statement against the king of France, and his daughter Anne finished it after she became queen. The history museum inside costs 9 euros and closes on Mondays outside July and August. The ramparts and courtyard are free and open daily from half past eight in the morning to seven in the evening, and until 8 in the evening from 1 July to 31 August, while the moat garden opens at 8 in the morning.

A concrete bunker poured by German troops in the Second World War sits half buried along the rampart at the foot of the Vieux Donjon. Up on the walkway, look down into the moat garden, where lawns now replace the water that once defended the duke.

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul

The reopened cathedral, with the duke's recumbent figures in a side chapel.

Inside, the first thing to understand is what you cannot see. The cathedral's west front and the organ tribune are wrapped in scaffolding 41 metres high until 2028, part of the repair of the fire set here on 18 July 2020. The church reopened on 27 September 2025, and the interior is open, but the work continues around you. Now walk toward the side chapels.

Since February 2026, the most precious sculptures from the tomb of François II and Marguerite de Foix have been shown in one of them while the monument itself is restored. You'll find the two recumbent figures, the duke and duchess carved in their prime, a lion and a greyhound at their feet, and the four cardinal virtues of Strength, Justice, Prudence and Temperance. The tomb was ordered in 1499 by their daughter Anne de Bretagne and carved by Michel Colombe, erected in the Carmelite convent in 1507 and moved here in 1817. The full monument remains off site while its lower stones sit in desalination baths, so for now this chapel is the closest you can come to a great work of French Renaissance sculpture.