Tours

You can get to Tours from Paris in fifty-five minutes on the TGV, which is fast enough that the city still registers as a surprise. I’d spent an afternoon in a Montparnasse office, and by early evening I was sitting on a café terrace in the Place Plumereau watching a student argue passionately with her phone while a man at the adjacent table sliced into a rillons — a chunk of braised belly pork, golden and caramelized — with the quiet focus of someone who does not intend to be interrupted. The medieval timber-frame houses rose around the square on three sides, their upper floors cantilevered over the street. The evening light caught the old wood and made it amber.

Tours does not perform its history the way some Loire cities do. The medieval quarter exists not as a preservation zone but as an actual neighborhood where people live above the restaurants and bars. Vieux-Tours — the area around Place Plumereau and the rue Coligny — is all fifteenth and sixteenth-century half-timber, all crooked upper floors and carved wooden brackets, and it is also where the university students drink, where the best sandwich shops operate, where a jazz bar I won’t name because naming it would ruin it runs on Thursdays until two in the morning.

The covered market — Les Halles de Tours — runs Tuesday through Sunday mornings on the Place Gaston-Paillhou, and it is the best argument for staying in Tours rather than using it as a base for château day trips. The rillettes are the thing to understand: not the smooth industrial pâté you find everywhere, but a coarse, slow-braised shred of pork fat and meat that has been worked by hand into rough, unctuous pots and tastes of six hours of cooking and nothing else. The fish stalls sell zander and bream from the Loire. The cheese section has enough local chèvre to constitute a serious research project. I spent a Saturday morning buying too much of everything and eating the overflow standing at a barrel outside.

The Cathédrale Saint-Gatien took four centuries to build and it shows — a pure Gothic nave begun in the thirteenth century, a set of sixteenth-century towers completed in a different style, stained glass that runs from 1200 to the twentieth century and is somehow coherent. On a cloudy morning the light through the nave windows shifts from green to blue to gold as the clouds move, and the space feels genuinely alive rather than simply preserved. Tours is not short of things to look at, but this is the one I keep returning to.

The wine scene in Tours is better than its reputation suggests. A string of natural wine bars and cave à manger operations have opened in the old quarter over the last decade, pouring Bourgueil, Chinon, Montlouis-sur-Loire, Touraine rouge — all the appellations that get overlooked because they lack the name recognition of Sancerre or Muscadet. The prices are still remarkably honest. I drank a bottle of Bourgueil at a table the size of a chopping board and spent the rest of the evening trying to remember why I’d ever paid more for something less interesting.

When to go: Tours works year-round in a way that purely château-focused stops don’t. The student energy is highest October through May when university is in session, the market is best in spring and early autumn. July and August are still pleasant — the city fills with Loire Valley visitors using it as a base, which means the restaurants are busier but the old quarter remains lively rather than dead as it can feel in some quieter Loire towns.