Chief town of the Loire
valley and capital of
the Touraine region,
TOURS has long had a
reputation as a staid,
bourgeois city. An
English travel writer
wrote in 1913:
Tours has an
immense air of good
breeding & you have
visions of portentously
dull entertainments in
lofty gilded saloons
where everything is
rather icily magnificent
.
It is a reputation
that Tours doesn't
really deserve: it's a
bustling urban centre,
only an hour's journey
from Paris on the TGV
line, with a great many
restaurants, bars and
cafés, and, thanks to
the student population,
a lively nightlife.
These factors, together
with the building of a
new conference centre,
have brought an influx
of business people and
young commuters into an
already large and fairly
diverse population. It
has a prettified and
fairly animated old
quarter , some good
museums - of wine,
crafts, stained glass
and an above-average
Beaux-Arts museum - and
a great many fine
buildings, not least of
which is St Gatien's
cathedral . And if
you don't have your own
transport, it's the
obvious Touraine base,
with both bus and train
connections to a snatch
of notable châteaux -
Villandry, Langeais,
Azay-le-Rideau and
Amboise - as well
as the celebrated wine-producing
towns of Vouvray
and Bourgeuil .
The City
The centre of Tours lies
between the Loire and
its tributary, the Cher,
but has spread far
across both banks, with
industrial Tours north
of the Loire. Neither
river is a particular
feature of the town,
though there are parks
on islands in both
rivers and a newish
footbridge across the
Loire from the site of
the old castle on quai
d'Orléans. The city's
old quarter focuses not
on the cathedral or the
château, but on the
picturesque place
Plumereau, some 600m to
the west of the main rue
Nationale.
