page_title: Nantes
section_title: Parks and environment
hierarchical_section_title: Nantes / Geography / Parks and environment
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Palmarium du Jardin des plantes de Nantes. Stores tirés pour protéger les plantes du soleil.
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 has 100 public parks, gardens and squares covering 218 hectares (540 acres). The oldest is the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden created in 1807. It has a large collection of exotic plants, including a 200-year-old Magnolia grandiflora and the national collection of camellia. Other large parks include the Parc de Procé, Parc du Grand Blottereau and Parc de la Gaudinière, the former gardens of country houses built outside the old town. Natural areas, an additional 180 hectares (440 acres), include the Petite Amazonie (a Natura 2000 protected forest) and several woods, meadows and marshes. Green space (public and private) makes up 41 percent of Nantes' area.
  The city adopted an ecological framework in 2007 to reduce greenhouse gases and promote energy transition. Nantes has three ecodistricts (one on the Isle of Nantes, one near the train station and the third in the north-east of the city), which aim to provide affordable, ecological housing and counter urban sprawl by redeveloping neglected areas of the city.
caption: A 19th-century greenhouse in the Jardin des Plantes
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