Loire (river)

Loire

Loire
Origin Massif Central
Mouth Atlantic Ocean
Basin countries France
Length 1,013 km (629 miles)
Source elevation 1,408 m (4607 ft)
Avg. discharge 850 m3/s (30,000 cu ft/s)
Basin area 117,000 km2 (45,000 sq mi)
The Loire at Decize
The Loire spanned at Nantes

The Loire (French pronunciation: [lwaʁ]) is the longest river in France. With a length of 1,013 kilometres (629 mi), it drains an area of 117,000 km2 (45,000 sq mi), which represents more than a fifth of France's land area. It rises in the Cévennes in the département of Ardèche at 1,350 m (4,430 ft) near Mont Gerbier de Jonc, and flows for over 1,000 km (620 mi) north through Nevers to Orléans, then west through Tours and Nantes until it reaches the Bay of Biscay at St Nazaire. Its main tributaries include the Maine, Nièvre and the Erdre rivers on its right bank, and the Allier, Cher, Indre, Vienne, and the Sèvre Nantaise rivers on the left bank. The Loire gives its name to six départements: Loire, Haute-Loire, Loire-Atlantique, Indre-et-Loire, Maine-et-Loire, and Saône-et-Loire. The central part of the Loire Valley was added to the World Heritage Sites list of UNESCO on December 2, 2000. The banks are characterized by vineyards and chateaux in the Loire Valley.

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Name

The name "Loire" comes from Latin Liger, which is itself a transcription of the native Gaulish (Celtic) name of the river. The Gaulish name comes from the Gaulish word liga, which means "silt, sediment, deposit, alluvium", a word that gave French lie, as in sur lie, which in turn gave English lees. Liga comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *legh-, meaning "to lie, lay", which gave many words in English, such as to lie, to lay, ledge, law, etc.

In French the adjective derived from the river is ligérien, as in le climat ligérien ("the climate of the Loire Valley"), a climate considered the most pleasant of northern France, with warmer winters and, more generally, fewer extremes in temperatures, rarely exceeding 38 °C (100 °F).

Origins of the river

The Loire in Orléans.
Looking towards central Tours from the north bank of the River Loire.

Studies of the paleogeography of the region suggest that in the Pleistocene the paleo-Loire continued its northward flow and joined the Seine,[1] while the lower Loire found its source upstream of Orléans in the region of Gien, flowing westward along the present course. At a certain point during the long history of uplift in the Paris Basin, the lower, Atlantic Loire captured the "paleo-Loire" or Loire séquanaise ("Loire-Seine"), producing the present river. The former bed of the Loire séquanaise is occupied by the Loing.

Geography

Originating in Ardèche, in springs on Mont Gerbier de Jonc in the north-eastern part of the southern Cévennes highlands, the Loire flows roughly northward through Roanne and Nevers to Orléans and thereafter westward through Tours to the Atlantic at Nantes, where it forms an estuary. Changes in the river's water levels have sometimes resulted in serious flooding, notably in 1856, 1866 and 1911.

Unlike most other rivers in western Europe, there are very few dams or locks creating obstacles to its natural flow. The Villerest dam, built in 1985 a few kilometres south of Roanne, has played a key-role in preventing recent flooding. As a result, the Loire is a very popular river for boating excursions, flowing through a pastoral countryside, past limestone cliffs and historic castles.

Navigation

For over 2,000 years, the Loire was one of the great highways of France, but the coming of the railway in the 19th century caused a collapse in the river's commercial navigation. Today the river is only regarded as navigable as far as Bouchemaine, where the Maine joins it near Angers, together with a short stretch much further upstream at Decize, where a river level crossing from the Canal latéral à la Loire connects to the Canal du Nivernais.

The Phoenicians and Greeks had used packhorses to transport goods from Lyon to the Loire to get from the Mediterranean basin to the Atlantic coast. The Romans used the Loire as far as Roanne, only around 150 km (93 mi) from the source, whilst the Vikings used longships to attack Tours.

River traffic increased until the 19th century, with a toll system being used in medieval times. For centuries attempts were made to keep a navigable channel open by the use of wooden embankments and dredging. During the 17th century, Jean-Baptiste Colbert instituted stone retaining walls and quays from Roanne to Nantes which helped make the river more reliable, but navigation was frequently stopped by flood and drought. In 1707 floods were said to have drowned 50,000 people, with the water rising more than 3 m (9.8 ft) in two hours in Orléans. A typical passenger timetable from Orléans to Nantes took eight days, with the upstream journey against the flow taking fourteen.

Steam-driven passenger boats appeared soon after the beginning of the 19th century plying the river between Nantes and Orléans; by 1843, 70,000 passengers were being carried annually in the lower river. However with the introduction of the railway in the 1840s trade on the river steadily declined and proposals to build a fully navigable river up to Briare came to nothing. The opening of the Canal latéral à la Loire in 1838 enabled navigation between Digoin and Briare to continue, but the river level crossing at Briare remained a problem until the construction of the Briare aqueduct in 1896.

The Canal de Roanne à Digoin was also opened in 1838 and was nearly closed in 1971 but still provides navigation further up the Loire valley to Digoin. However the 261 km (162 mi) Canal de Berry, a narrow canal with locks only 2.7 m (8.9 ft) wide, which was opened in 1820s and connected the Canal latéral à la Loire at Marseilles-lès-Aubigny to the Cher River at Noyers and back into the Loire near Tours, was closed in 1955.

Tributaries

The Loire's tributaries include the following rivers, in order going upstream:

Départements and towns

The Loire as it flows through Blois.

Several départements of France were named after the Loire. The Loire flows through the following départements and towns:

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ J. Tourenq and C. Pomerol, "Mise en évidence, par la présence d'augite du Massif Central, de l'existance d'une pré-Loire-pré-Seine coulant vers la Manche," Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, 320, 1995:1163-1169; Pierre Antoine, Jean Pierre Lautridou and Michel Laurent, "Long-term fluvial archives in NW France: response of the Seine and Somme rivers to tectonic movements, climatic variations and sea-level changes", Geomorphology 33.3-4, (June 2000:183-207)

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