While
Nantes is a pleasant city, with white and grey stone buildings flanking
the mouth of the Loire River, it doesn't have the spectacular
architecture, major historical significance or three-star restaurants of
some of its French counterparts. So the city decided to create its own
unique attraction
In
2007 Nantes opened the combined art installation and amusement park on
the site of a former shipyard. Les Machines offers both carnival-style
rides for which anyone can purchase a ticket, and smaller machines
demonstrated by visitors selected from the crowd. The result is a kind
of steampunk amusement park, and a breathtaking juxtaposition of old,
new – and weird.
- Why not ride on an oversized spider? (Hana Schank)
Les
Machines is inspired by Jules Verne, who was born and raised in Nantes,
and the installations feel like 19th-century science fiction come to
life. Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, for
example, inspired the three-storey, 25m-tall Carrousel des Mondes Marin
(Marine Worlds Carousel). Visitors can choose to ride on three levels of
mechanical sea creatures: squid and crab on the lowest level, suspended
fish on the second and boats and jellyfish at the top.
Since the
carousel elements are moveable, adults and kids alike scramble into
seats and buckle themselves into the mouths of giant fish or aboard
boats, pushing pedals and pulling levers to make the machines rock and
spew steam.
- Carousel riders can pull levers to make the boats rock and steam shoot out. (Hana Schank)
The
island’s biggest showstopper, however, is a 48-tonne mechanical
elephant. The creature, which carries 50 riders, stomps the entire
length of the park – from the entrance, across the shipyard and past an
old warehouse to the carousel, before looping back to discharge
passengers and wait for new ones. The wild ride takes a half hour.
- The park famous, mechanical elephant delights visitors with its presence and its sprayHanna Schan
Inspired by Verne’s 1880 novel The Steam House, in which British colonists travel through
in a house wheeled by a steam-powered elephant, the ride gives
passengers the chance to view Nantes’ warehouses, ships and 18th-century
mansions from a unique vantage point 12m in the air – the equivalent of
being on the third storey of a moving house. It also sprays water at
unsuspecting observers.
Smaller machines are housed inside the
soaring Galerie Des Machinesmachine gallery including a flying heron
and a menagerie of prehistoric-looking metal bugs, spiders and other
imaginary pedal-powered slithering insects, all fitted with seats for
riders.
