| TOURS - FRANCE 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 Tours
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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