Nantes: The Great Elephant, the Dukes' Castle and the Green Line

Required Activities

• Ride the Great Elephant — 48 tonnes of carved tulipwood and steel, 12 m high, 52 passengers on its back — and stay where you can see the leg mechanism working under you and feel the whole animal shift at each step, with the view running from Trentemoult to the place du Commerce

• Ride the Carrousel des Mondes Marins, 25 m high and 36 machines over three floors — sea floor, abyss, then surface and boats — and take the controls of your creature yourself; aim for the Serpent des Mers, the biggest of them at 3.5 m high and 8 m long

• Walk the full circuit of the castle ramparts and find where the powder magazine blew up in 1800 and took a good part of the building with it, then go through the museum of the history of Nantes inside and come out past the statue of Anne of Brittany on the place Marc-Elder

• Follow the green line on the pavement for at least a couple of kilometres of its twenty, and count the stops you pass: the permanent route runs all year and alternates deliberately between a work by a living artist and a building, famous or overlooked

• Go into the Galerie des Machines in the old Dubigeon shipbuilding sheds and climb to one of the two terraces 7.5 m up to watch the boilermakers, welders, sculptors and joiners building the next machine below you