Day Trips

Guérande and the salt pans

A walled medieval town above a landscape of salt marshes still worked by hand. The paludiers rake fleur de sel off the surface of the pans in summer, and the flat silver geometry of the marshes is unlike anywhere else in France.

Reached by train to La Baule or Saint-Nazaire and then a bus; check the connection rather than assuming it.

Saint-Nazaire

The Atlantic port at the mouth of the Loire, and the site of an enormous concrete submarine base the Allies could not destroy. The city was flattened around it and rebuilt; the base is now open and used for exhibitions.

It is also where the big cruise ships are built. Trains run down the estuary in well under an hour.

Clisson, and the coast

Clisson, south towards the Muscadet vineyards, was rebuilt in the nineteenth century in a deliberately Italian style — terracotta roofs, campaniles and loggias in the middle of western France. It is genuinely strange and it is a short train ride.

Pornic and the coast are reachable in about an hour for a beach day.

Further down the Atlantic

If your journey continues south, direct trains run from Nantes to Bordeaux, the wine city on the Garonne, whose own visitor guide is Access Bordeaux. It is too far for a day trip, but a natural next stop on a longer journey down the Atlantic coast.

In the other direction, trains from Nantes run to the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, whose own visitor guide is My Paris Travel.

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