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Nantes, the former capital of Brittany, is no longer officially part of the province: it was transferred to the Pays de la Loire in 1962 when the modern administrative regions were established. Nonetheless, such bureaucracy is not taken too seriously in a city whose history is so intimately bound up with Breton fortunes, and whose inhabitants still consider it to be an integral part of the province. A considerable medieval centre, it later achieved great wealth from colonial expeditions, the slave trade and shipbuilding - activities in turn surpassed by more recent industrial growth. Although much of the former provincial character of the city has been lost, thanks to such recent accretions as the tower blocks masking the Loire and motorways tearing past the city, it remains to its inhabitants an integral part of Brittany.
The Loire, the source of Nantes' riches, has dwindled from the centre. As recently as the 1930s the river crossed the city in seven separate channels, but German labour as part of reparations for World War I filled in five. What are still called "islands" in the centre are now surrounded and isolated, not by water, but by hectic dual carriageways. These are not easy to cross, but they do at least mean that Nantes is separated into a series of discernible districts: the older medieval city is concentrated around the cathedral, with the château prominent in its southeast corner, and the elegant nineteenth-century town lies to the west, across the cours des 50-Otages.
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