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Few landscapes in France carry the weight of history quite as lightly as the Loire Valley. Stretching roughly two hundred kilometres along the Loire river between Gien in the east and the Atlantic approaches near Nantes in the west, this is a region where Renaissance ambition was translated directly into stone, water, and formal gardens. The French kings who retreated here from Paris in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries left behind a concentration of royal châteaux that has no parallel anywhere in Europe, and UNESCO recognised as much when it inscribed the central Loire Valley on its World Heritage List in 2000.

The two towns that most visitors use as a base, Tours and Amboise, sit within easy reach of the greatest châteaux and could hardly be more different in character. Tours is a proper city, with a medieval old quarter around the Place Plumereau, a university population that keeps its restaurants and wine bars lively well into the evening, and a cathedral, Saint-Gatien, whose façade is a textbook study in the long transition from Gothic to Renaissance. Amboise is smaller and more immediately dramatic, its royal castle rising sheer above the town and the river on a rocky promontory. Leonardo da Vinci spent the last three years of his life here at the invitation of François I, and the Clos Lucé manor house where he lived and worked has been turned into a museum and park devoted to his inventions, making it one of the more unusual château experiences in the valley.