The other bank — the painted fishing village of Trentemoult and the remaking west of Chantenay, reached by the little Navibus across the Loire.
01 The other bank, best reached by boat
The navibus is the secret. Nantes's little river ferry takes about ten minutes from Gare Maritime on the quai de la Fosse, and when you step off on the south bank the city feels genuinely different — slower, more village, more itself.
Trentemoult is the obvious draw, and it earns it. This was a working fishing settlement long before the city grew up around it, and the evidence is everywhere: the houses are packed tight along narrow lanes barely wider than a bicycle, painted in ochre, terracotta, duck-egg blue, with window boxes that seem to compete for the best geraniums on the block. The river is always just there, glimpsed between buildings, felt in the light. Café Amalia on the waterfront terrace is the place to land — pastis in summer, wine any time, the Loire filling the whole frame in front of you. The village resists chain restaurants and chain anything; it has held that line stubbornly, which is probably why Nantais from across the river keep coming back.
The houses are painted in ochre, terracotta and duck-egg blue, and the river is always just there.
Chantenay, just across the river, is less postcard, more real. The hillside quartier north of Trentemoult spent much of the twentieth century as a working-class industrial neighbourhood, defined by the canning factories that processed the Loire Valley's sardines and vegetables. The old Biscuit LU plant is in Saint-Nicolas, but Chantenay had its own version of that grimy, productive life. Now the hill is being slowly reclaimed — community gardens on the slopes, a handful of independent addresses, the kind of gradual gentrification that hasn't yet flattened the character. The view from the Colline Saint-Anne, looking back east along the Loire towards the city, is one of Nantes's great quiet rewards: the cathedral, the LU tower, the cranes of the île de Nantes laid out like a map you've been walking all week.
Cross early, wander both, and give yourself lunch in Trentemoult. The navibus runs regularly; check Tan's live schedule before you go.