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Tours
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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 a?Ļ 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 cafAŠs, 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 chA?teaux -
Villandry, Langeais, Azay-le-Rideau
and
Amboise
- as well as the celebrated wine-producing towns of
Vouvray
and
Bourgeuil
. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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France,
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