Total population: 3 million

Principal city: Nantes

The region is composed largely of the historical regions of Anjou (around Angers), Maine (around Le Mans), a portion of Brittany (around Nantes) and the Vendée.

Although not as famous to the English-speaking world as Brittany, Normandy or the Côte d'Azur, the Pays de la Loire nevertheless attracts thousands of foreign families each year, thanks to a profusion of family campsites along the sandy Atlantic coast. The coast is peppered with pleasant resorts, of which La Baule takes the bouquet as the classiest, with Les Sables d'Olonne in the Vendée coming a close second. The little village of St-Marc, however, has an even more special place in many people's hearts. Just west of St-Nazaire, it was the subject of Jacques Tati's film Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.

Nantes is a large, bustling town, home to the most important gallery of paintings in France after the Louvre. Its impressive château des ducs de Bretagne is well worth a visit, as is the passage Pommeraye, a sumptuous and fantastical 19th-century shopping arcade. The département was detached from Brittany in 1941, but even today most of Nantais would like the Loire-Atlantique to be reattached to Brittany. Matters reached a head in 2001, when the reigning Miss Brittany was temporarily sacked for uttering her support for the cause.

The town of Saumur is one of the most popular tourist attractions, being the home of the Cadre noir military riding school and, as a consequence, the "capital of horsemanship". Saumur is also famous for its mushrooms; it is the world's largest producer the white champignons de Paris, and for its sparkling white wine, although rosé and some red is produced in the area.

The Western Loire region and the Vendée in particular suffered enormous bloodshed during the Revolution, as the pro-royalist backlash (the Chouans) put up a spirited resistance. The civil war lasted the best part of a decade and took the lives of a third of a million citizens. Certainly the grimmest of all episodes during the Terror was the method of execution carried out in Nantes. Called déportation verticale, it consisted quite bluntly of packing boats with prisoners (male and female) and scuttling them in the Loire.