Loire-Atlantique
It is surprising how few visitors to France know the department of Loire Atlantique, its 133 kilometres of coastline and the golden beaches of Pornichet and La Baule, as if this ancient and at times reluctant bit of France is merely en route to something further south.
Certainly Nantes is a key place, and the capital of the department, but the modern roads just skim on by, and, unless you are specifically investigating the area, you fail to make the acquaintance of an intriguing corner of France at the estuary of the Loire . It is the association between the Atlantic and the Loire that has created a unique landscape, and important habitat for rare animal and plant species.
St Nazaire, where the Loire finally meets the sea, is a rectangular kind of place; many of its buildings are plain, boxy and unimaginatively designed, and the streets are in a grid pattern, although the great long sweep of Plage de Saint-Nazaire is curvy and inviting. Until the mid 1800s, St Nazaire was a small fishing port. And then the silting Loire meant that ocean-going vessels had difficulty continuing up-river to Nantes Mediterranean .
To cope with this growth in trade, St Nazaire expanded rapidly, but during World War II became the base for German warships and submarines that harassed Allied convoys in the Atlantic . The result was that by the end of the war, St Nazaire was all but razed to the ground, and had to be rebuilt. That rebuilding is still going on, because now St Nazaire is developing as a tourist destination, partly for its wartime associations, but also for its gentle climate and fine beaches. A stroll along the Boulevard du Président Wilson, past the American monument in the bay, and into the aromatic Jardin des Plantes and the Parc Paysager a little further on will take you past attractive buildings and along narrow streets that in any other town would lead you back to the centre – except St Nazaire doesn’t really have a centre, or an Old Town.
West along the coast, Pornichet, a mainly seafront agglomeration, is the eastern end of nine kilometres of golden sand beach that stretches all the way to La Baule, said to be Europe’s most beautiful beach, although Porto Santo in the islands of Madeira may have something to say about that. La Baule beach is certainly popular at all times of the year, and painfully so during the main summer season. But the sight of nine-kilometres of young, nubile, bronzed, minimalistically clad beautiful people is not a sight a man of my age and sensitivity should be exposed to other than briefly; drooling in public is not a pretty sight. So, after a couple of studious hours, I wandered off in search of coffee.
What I found was quite a revelation: not the coffee, but that La Baule seafront is a sham, a façade of fanciful frivolity bolted onto a late 19th/early 20th-century linear settlement of fine-looking, timber-framed villas in a complex of styles, all with numerous sea-facing windows and balconies, turrets and attic rooms for the servants. More than 1,500 elegant and refined villas exist and all of them classed as historic monuments, and therefore protected. They are heavily redolent of the Belle Époque, the ‘beautiful era’ that ran from the late 19th century until the First World War, a Golden Age during which peace prevailed between the major nations of Europe and new technology was changing people’s lives.
In the early part of the 19th century it was the community of Escoublac that first became established. At that time, it was built on an area that was almost entirely sand dunes, and was gradually destroyed by storms, the worst in 1779, and so the village was moved inland. But the attractions of the coast were worth pursuing, and around 1840, the dunes were stabilised by the planting of maritime pines, enabling the new development of La Baule. Not surprisingly, perhaps, if you study it for a while, it has earned the sobriquet, the ‘Love Coast ’, the Cote d’Amour.
Inland, to the north of St Nazaire, lies the Parc Naturel Régional Brière (La Grande Brière), a 20,000-hectare area of peatland, reed beds, floodplains, canals, lagoons and watercourses second in importance only to the Camargue. These marshes (marais in French), through which near-silent trips in flat-bottomed boats are organised, are a delight for bird watchers, with more than 200 species recorded annually including such delights as nightingale, purple heron, egret, spoonbill, bluethroat and numerous warblers.
In the past, this whole area was afforested, and inhabited by Neolithic man. But he was forced out when the sea level rose. This in turn allowed the marshes to form, as a result of which many of the trees died and the vegetation decomposed to form peat.
Still used for cattle grazing and peat extraction during the late summer when much of the water has gone, large areas have, however, been progressively abandoned by man, and this has led to colonisation by reeds, willows and elms. From time to time large chunks of fossilised tree emerge, more than 5,000 years old, known as mortas and somewhere in constitution between petrified wood and rock. Today, the reeds are a ready supply of roofing material, as evidenced by the thousands of thatched cottages found in the many small villages and hamlets that dot the reserve area.
There is a great peace among the reed beds, especially when you are being punted along by the broad shoulders of a guide. But out in the middle of the marsh, where one clump of reeds looks very much like another, you become acutely conscious of how reliant you are on the man heaving the boat along to get you back to dry land.
Alas, fresh-water crayfish are doing a good deal of damage to the vegetation; they are voracious and virtually unstoppable. So, given the chance to eat crayfish (écrevisses) on a menu, tuck in heartily, in fact, have a second dish of them; it’s a conservation issue – actually they are rather delicious, served poêlée with garlic butter.
In the south-west corner of Brière sits the town of Guérande church of St Aubin
Close by I stop for lunch just as the hurdy-gurdy man appears to regale us with free-range music and song, but, for me, no dance; the spirit is willing but the stomach is full. In any case, it is very difficult to tap your feet and eat moules marinières without splashing everyone in sight. Actually, the instrument is not so much a hurdy-gurdy as a barrel organ, an Orgue de Barbarie, but it manages a decent rendition of Brubeck’s ‘Unsquare Dance’ in among numerous folkloric tunes.
It doesn’t take long to walk around Guérande, but it is a fascinating place with architectural styles that cover many periods since the Romanesque. Salt, of course, is on sale, very cheaply, just about everywhere, as are crêpes, gauffres, which become the receptacle for any number of tasty ingredients.
The landscape south of the Loire, reached by the rather stupendous 60-metre high Pont de St Nazaire, built as recently as 1974, seems somehow different; more vegetated, less evidently industrial. Here, you pursue a line of coastal villages – St Brevin, the curiously named St Michel Chef Chef, Préfailles and Sainte-Marie sur Mer – to reach the old town of Pornic, a neat and endearing fishing port from which, in times gone by, trawlers would set off across the Atlantic for the perilous cod waters of Newfoundland.
Comité Départemental du Tourisme de Loire-Atlantique
11 rue du Chateau de l’Eraudière
CS 40698
44306 NANTES Cedex 3
Tel: 02 51 72 95 30
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