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. |
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