What is actually on the island
The shipyards closed in 1987 and took the city's industrial identity with them. What replaced them is a workshop that builds enormous articulated animals out of wood, steel and hydraulics and runs them in public — Les Machines de l'île.
Three things sit together: the Grand Éléphant, which walks a slow circuit carrying passengers; the Carrousel des Mondes Marins, a three-storey merry-go-round of deep-sea creatures you operate yourself; and the Galerie des Machines, the workshop where prototypes are demonstrated.
They are separate tickets and the elephant runs to a schedule rather than continuously.
The rest of the island
West along the quay is the Hangar à Bananes — a banana warehouse turned bar strip — with Buren's eighteen steel rings standing outside it.
The elephant walks on a public quay. You can watch it for nothing, which a surprising number of visitors do not realise.
Why the city did this
Nantes lost its port and its shipbuilding within a generation and decided not to become a museum of itself. The machines, the biscuit factory turned arts centre and the green line are one continuous policy.
It is the clearest example in France of a city treating deindustrialisation as material.
Les Machines de l'Île
Hangar à Bananes & the Rings
Le Lieu Unique