Beyond the Châteaux: New Escapes in France’s Loire Valley

THIS WAS MY third visit to the Loire Valley from my home in Paris, and the whole fairy tale experience felt tired. Little beyond a nearby converted hotel had changed. Not the exasperated guide going through the motions, or the throngs of tourists dropped off by the busload and herded through each room at a fast clip. The dumbfounding beauty stretching the length of the Loire River was the same too, which is ultimately what salvaged the trip.

A lack of change does not have to be a bad thing: The UNESCO Heritage-protected region, which drew 9 million yearly visitors to its cultural sites and 1 million cyclists before the pandemic, has been beloved for decades for its castles and the rolling vineyards that produce what oenophiles consider France’s most diverse selection of wine. But it has arguably leaned too heavily on that past, reliant on what appeared to be an endless stream of travellers interested only in château-hopping and bicycling. With all of the Loire’s dramatic landscapes and rising culinary stars, was this the best it could offer?

It is a question that local chefs, hoteliers, entrepreneurs and regional leaders were asking themselves even before the coronavirus hit, setting their sights on the area’s reinvention. By the time I returned in October 2021 to meet some of them, the region’s evolving identity was palpable.

“Our cycle route and châteaux have always been popular, but the fairy tale needed updating,” said François Bonneau, president of the Centre-val de Loire, the regional council overseeing the Loire Valley. “The French traveller has long associated it with field trips they took as schoolchildren, while the foreign traveller has a plethora of other destinations in the country to choose from. We needed to better express the region’s identity in its entirety.”

The pandemic, he continued, only reinforced the need to promote the region differently as visits to the valley’s major sites dropped by 43% in 2020 and 32% in 2021 — unsettling numbers for a region where tourism makes up 5% of the local GDP, or around 3.4 billion euros.

Rethinking what Loire Valley travel should be for the future has meant shifting the focus from fairy tale castle crawls to experiences anchored more firmly in nature, food and the arts, all while continuing to celebrate the region’s unique terroir.

That was evident from one of my first stops, at the 15thcentury Château de Rivau. Patricia Laigneau, a co-owner, has been working to attract a broader audience for the storybook castle and sought-after wedding venue through food, devoting the last few years to the produce grown and cooked on-site.

Her two organic kitchen gardens were half-moon-shaped and overflowing with forgotten or nearly extinct varieties of regional vegetables such as Berry sucrine, violet celery and more than 43 varieties of colourful gourds. It is considered an official conservatory for Loire Valley produce by the Pôle Biodom’centre, a regional center for preserving local biodiversity. The homegrown produce, in addition to a host of herbs and edible flowers, have been used for years in Rivau’s nofrills café. But now they are the foundation of the menu at Jardin Secret, Laigneau’s new 20-seat fine dining restaurant set up beneath a glass canopy and surrounded by rose bushes. She brought on chef Nicolas Gaulandeau, native to the region, to highlight the local bounty through dishes ranging from squash served with pickles and smoked paprika to roasted rack of lamb with vegetables from the garden.

“Not only were our guests asking for something more, I saw the restaurant as an opportunity to show that the châteaux of the Loire can be champions of French gastronomy,” Laigneau said.

Celebrating the land and its food is central to other new properties in the region.

In July 2020, Anne-caroline Frey opened Loire Valley Lodges on 750 acres of private forestland in Touraine.

“Things have been very slow to change here, so of course the idea seemed wild,” said the former art dealer. “But we were fully booked almost instantly.”