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Île Feydeau was once a genuine island, a sandy bank in the middle of the Loire that the city began building on in the 1720s. The wealthy merchants and shipowners who made their fortunes in the Atlantic trade of Nantes covered it with opulent townhouses, their facades decorated with hundreds of sculpted faces called mascarons. Because the ground was soft and waterlogged, the buildings were raised on wooden rafts, and many of them settled unevenly and tilted over the decades, giving the district its famously leaning walls. The writer Jules Verne was born here in 1828, in his grandmother's house, long before the surrounding arms of the Loire were filled in between the 1920s and the 1940s, leaving the island marooned among ordinary streets. The wealth on display, however, carries a heavy shadow, for much of it was built on the transatlantic slave trade that made Nantes the busiest slaving port in France.
Fatti principali
- 1828 year — Jules Verne, the father of modern science fiction, was born in a house on the island
- 1722 year — The city acquired the sandy island to raise the shipowners' district upon it
- 450000 enslaved people — Passed through the port of Nantes during the eighteenth century slave trade
📍 Boulevard Jean Philippot, 44093, Nantes