Nantes Tourist Attractions The old Breton port of Nantes, chief
town of the département of Loire-Atlantique, the see of a bishop
and a university town, lies at the junction of the Erdre
(flowing underground for the last part of its course) with the
Loire, here divided into a number of arms and navigable, which
50km/30mi farther downstream flows into the Atlantic at St-
Nazaire. The port of St-Nazaire, the first port in France to be
entirely electronically controlled, has a turnover of 23 million
tons.Nantes was the birthplace of the writer Jules Verne
(1828-1905).Nantes, under the name of Condevincum, was the
capital of a Gallic tribe, the Namnetae. Then and subsequently,
down to the end of the 15th C, the town fought to maintain its
independence against the Romans, the Normans, the English and
the French. In the Middle Ages Nantes was for a time capital of
the Duchy of Brittany, which fell to the French crown in 1532.
In 1598 Henry IV signed here the famous Edict of Nantes, which
granted freedom of religious