Nantes, the hipster city
Nantes is the most civilized place I've seen this year, a city that gives envy at every step: "Do they really have a 40-foot mechanical elephant?" , "Have they really put all this musical equipment in the hands of local bands in such a beautiful building?", "Have they really made it so easy for you to go anywhere by bicycle?", "Another garden?".
Nantes is being this 2013 the European Green Capital. And this title suits her as logically and naturally as reeds do Halong Bay or Scarlett Johanson a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. The formula here is summarized as follows: contemporary culture + green culture + tourism = Nantes. All damn modern. Let's condense its native hipsterism into a handful of examples of cool stuff Nantes displays like this, point-blank and almost nonchalantly.
ALL VERY GREEN
The European Green Capital of 2013 is overwhelmingly green. They are distributed throughout the city 100 gardens with more than 1,000 hectares . Any inhabitant of Nantes has a natural space less than 300 meters from their home (like Vitorians). If the WHO recommends 9 square meters of green per inhabitant, the capital has 57 , between 2 and 5 times more than any other French city. There are themed green areas (such as a Korean and a Japanese garden), floating gardens of local plants in the middle of the rivers and large spaces where everything fits, such as the Garden of Plants.
The Japanese Garden of Nantes
It is the oldest of the Nantes parks and preserves thousands of varieties from all over the world. It has, on the one hand, a playful offer that includes vegetable huts, hedges trimmed in the shape of chicks or benches of altered proportions to play around and then send it to Instagram. And it also has a more scientific face, like the belle epoque series of glass and steel greenhouses. They all contain wonders such as the Penis of Titan, the largest flower in the world , with a stem more than two meters high. One of them is going to dedicate itself to Canarian plants next year and at the entrance of another grows a variety of the allium schoenoprasum herb whose leaves taste like an oyster . Even the restaurant, the Café de Lórangerie, is so integrated that it offers dishes made with plants from the park on its menu. Nantes has such a vegetal vocation that it has even placed some dazzling red rosebushes in a highly prosaic place a priori like the medians of the avenues, where you can smell the roses in the middle of the traffic jam.
THIS CUCUMBER IS FOR YOU
Part of the 300 municipal gardeners are dedicated to caring for urban gardens. Its fruits and vegetables, like the strawberries that grow next to the Chateau del Duc, are for you. Do not cut yourself and make a municipal salad.
Nantes, European Green Capital
STUDENTS = BARS
Where there are students there are bars full of students. Nantes has places with as much vibe as the Altercafé , a riverside joint with industrial decoration because it is in a hangar, the Hangar à banane, an old factory and current cultural space. There are often concerts and, when it's nice, install a terrace on the banks of the Loire of those to which you immediately give the title of "adoptive house".
If after that semi-siesta of moderns that the Altercafé proposes you get the bug of the dance, le lieu unique is the bar of one of the main cultural spaces of the city, which was the headquarters of the LU biscuit factory . Here it fits the theater, the circus, the exhibitions, the concerts and, above all, the dance in its club. It has a very mestizo and very creative electronic music programming. In other words, one day you find a theatrical performance with techno bases and another some break dancers.
The other weird bar in Nantes is Le nid . It rests on the 32nd floor of the tallest building in Nantes, the Brittany Tower, a hulk from the seventies that breaks the aesthetics of the city, but which, of course, displays the longest panoramic view that you will find around here. The place can be summed up like this: it is a large bird that has a nest inside that is a bar . That's why it's weird. It opens during the day, provides food and lasts until 2 in the morning with special electronic music parties.
To eat while still being cool, there is also La cantine du voyage , which is part of the summer program “A trip to Nantes”. It is an ephemeral restaurant that will close on September 29. It was conceived with the air of a brewery, with wooden benches and a unique, healthy menu and based on local products. He has spent the whole summer supporting culinary activities: workshops, talks and cooking classes.
Contemporary art center and bar: Le Lieu Unique
STREETS WITH ART
Nantes has been filling up with street art installations for a few years now. The idea is that they are all temporary, but some they take so much love that they don't have the heart to uninstall them . This is the case of the rings of the industrial area, which have become a symbol of the city.
This year the urban art project has been the Greedy stations, which created artistic spaces around public transport stops . For example, integrated picnic areas between floors that made you feel like you were spending a day in the country when you were just waiting for the tram. This summer Isaac Cordal from Pontevedra participated in the exhibition with the 2,000 suits of different sizes that made up his installation The new slavery. You can take a look at it for example here.
streets with art
ARTISTEO OPEN BAR
The Neighborhood of Creation is the opposite of one of our traditional and picturesque real estate balls in the confines of any Spanish city. Is about a new residential area built on the old port area . It has been carefully designed over the last decade with a heart shaped by La Fabrique, a luminous metallic cube.
La Fabrique has dedicated itself to artistic creation and has placed itself at the service of local associations, with spaces and activities that they manage themselves. They call it an artistic laboratory and includes cinema, concert hall and rehearsal spaces . It is the place to go if you want to feel intense insane envy for Nantes.
BY BIKE FOR BREAD
Bikes rule in Nantes. It is a flat city crossed by bike lanes in which it is almost easier to pedal than to drive. You just have to be careful with the trams. You can rent the bikes at the tourist offices and even encourage yourself from here to start the Water Walk, a 200-kilometre route along the Loire with more than 100 stops.
MACHINES OF ANOTHER FUTURE
The Gallery of Machines is a play area where a dreamlike twelve-meter-high mechanical elephant walks which you can climb. Next to it, the Carousel of the Marine Worlds is a merry-go-round 25 meters high and 22 meters in diameter with retro-futuristic fish cars. Both are conceived in the style of Victorian lucubrations about the future described, for example, by Alan Moore in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
There are many more references, of course, to the creations of Jules Verne from Nantes and the designs of Leonardo Da Vinci above all, but the result is something different from everything, a volatile ironclad alternate world in which nature was mechanical. Impossible steam, bolts and gears that are being expanded with a spiral garden and new mechanical animals that will fly around an adjacent gallery.
The mechanical elephant that gives us so much envy
THE ISLAND OF ARCHITECTS
On the Isle of Nantes, Jean Nouvel, Daniel Buren, Jean Prouvé, Christian de Portzamparc and other architects are transforming yet another of Nantes' dismantled industrial areas. On the west end of the island, the 1,400 square meters of the HAB Galerie are dedicated to contemporary art. Some of the ideas executed around here include social housing in coveted new buildings where the penthouses have been reserved for sale, thereby achieving two goals at once: social integration and financing of the project. And, well, a third bounce: that the admired visitor discovers that urban projects can be done in another way, in one that works.
*You may also be interested...
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- All the articles of Rafael de Rojas