page_title: Nantes
section_title: Location
hierarchical_section_title: Nantes / Geography / Location
caption_attribution_description: Nantes by SPOT Satellite
context_page_description: Nantes is a city in Loire-Atlantique on the Loire, 50 km from the Atlantic coast. The city is the sixth-largest in France, with a population of 303,382 in Nantes and a metropolitan area of nearly 950,000 inhabitants. With Saint-Nazaire, a seaport on the Loire estuary, Nantes forms one of the main north-western French metropolitan agglomerations.
  It is the administrative seat of the Loire-Atlantique department and the Pays de la Loire région, one of 18 regions of France. Nantes belongs historically and culturally to Brittany, a former duchy and province, and its omission from the modern administrative region of Brittany is controversial.
  Nantes was identified during classical antiquity as a port on the Loire. It was the seat of a bishopric at the end of the Roman era before it was conquered by the Bretons in 851. Although Nantes was the primary residence of the 15th-century dukes of Brittany, Rennes became the provincial capital after the 1532 union of Brittany and France.
context_section_description: Nantes is in north-western France, near the Atlantic Ocean and 342 kilometres (213 miles) south-west of Paris. Bordeaux, the other major metropolis of western France, is  274 kilometres (170 miles) south. Nantes and Bordeaux share positions at the mouth of an estuary, and Nantes is on the Loire estuary.
  The city is at a natural crossroads between the ocean in the west, the centre of France (towards Orléans) in the east, Brittany in the north and Vendée (on the way to Bordeaux) in the south. It is an architectural junction; northern French houses with slate roofs are north of the Loire, and Mediterranean dwellings with low terracotta roofs dominate the south bank. The Loire is also the northern limit of grape culture. Land north of Nantes is dominated by bocage and dedicated to polyculture and animal husbandry, and the south is renowned for its Muscadet vineyards and market gardens. The city is near the geographical centre of the land hemisphere, identified in 1945 by Samuel Boggs as near the main railway station (around 47°13′N 1°32′W).
caption: Nantes as seen by SPOT in 2004
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