Travellers: commoners and royalty alike - Portraits de Loire à la Renaissance 6/6

The Loire Valley World Heritage site and the Renaissance

The landscape of the Loire Valley, and more particularly its many cultural monuments, illustrate to an exceptional degree the ideals of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment on western European thought and design.  

The political and social history of France and Western Europe in the Middle Ages as well as during the Renaissance, the period when the Loire Valley was a seat of royal power, is illustrated by the buildings and castles that have made it famous: Benedictine abbeys first of all, then medieval fortresses, transformed during the Renaissance into country houses for recreation and pleasure, with gardens and vistas open to the countryside. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the Loire Valley constituted a major cultural area for encounters and influences between the Italian Mediterranean, France and Flanders, and participated in the development of garden art and the emergence of interest in the landscape.