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
of Tours
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...
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