France Guide
The Loire
The cathedral
The great west towers of the Cathédrale St-Gatien, standing on the square of the same name, are visible all over the city. Their surfaces crawl with decorated stone in the flamboyant Gothic style, and even the Renaissance belfries that cap them share the same spirit of refined exuberance. Inside, the style moves back in time, ending with relatively severe High Gothic east end – built in the thirteenth century – and its glorious stained-glass windows.
A door in the north aisle leads to the Cloître de la Psalette (April– Sept Mon– Sat 9.30am–12.30pm & 2–6pm, Sun 2–6pm; Oct– March Wed– Sun closes 5pm; €2.30), which has an unfinished air, with the great foot of a flying buttress planted in the southeast corner and the missing south arcade – lost when a road was driven through in 1802 by the same progressive, anticlerical prefect who destroyed the basilica of St-Martin. The area behind the cathedral and museum, to the east, is good for a short stroll. There's a fine view of the spidery buttresses supporting the cathedral's painfully thin-walled apse from place Grégoire de Tours. Overlooking the square is the oldest wing of the archbishop's palace, whose end wall is a mongrel of Romanesque and eighteenth-century work, with an early sixteenth-century projecting balcony once used by clerics to address their flock.