Mission Val de Loire’s activities

To highlight the Loire Valley World Heritage landscapes and develop our appreciation for the river, Mission Val de Loire organises an annual innovative programme called “Escales ligériennes”, which reaches out to local inhabitants. At each event, which calls in at different riverside towns and cities within the UNESCO site, the Mission team spends four days hosting activities in conjunction with other local events or stakeholders. These “Escales” are a fun and participatory opportunity for a wide audience to better understand the reasons behind the Loire Valley’s inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The Rendezvous of the Loire Valley is a convention organised by Mission Val de Loire to discuss and share the projects and key issues regarding protection of Loire heritage and landscapes. This convention is an opportunity to talk about what’s happening in the region, present projects led by the site’s local authorities and debate subjects to do with the inscription. In 2024, this convention was held for the 14^th time.

Mission Val de Loire supports local authorities in their consideration of the Loire Valley heritage and landscapes and UNESCO listing criteria, at various scales. It provides them with technical and regulatory assistance. Although the Loire Valley Management Plan is a reference document for local authorities, the aim above all is to raise their awareness at an early enough stage so that the criteria feature in urban planning documents.

To give fresh impetus to the Loire Valley World Heritage approaches, Mission Val de Loire launched a series of “campus” projects during the 2019-2020 academic year. Designed for higher education students on history of art, landscape, heritage, photography, law or urban planning courses, these projects seek to embed the “UNESCO Loire Valley” listing into curricula and, through site-specific initiatives, to raise these youngsters’ awareness of the Loire region.

Mission Val de Loire has produced exhibitions with a view to showcasing the multifaceted heritage of the Loire Valley. Loire Valley stakeholders are welcome to hire and host these touring exhibitions to share them widely.

Between 2019 and 2021, as part of a residency programme, Mission Val de Loire hosted the winners of the Mark Grosset Prize — awarded during the Vendôme Promenades photographiques festival — which recognises and promotes young photographers from international photography schools. These residency programmes sought to question the relationship between heritage monuments, the local area and its inhabitants.

Between 2015 and 2020, Mission Val de Loire teamed up with the Fondation Marquise de Narros-Institut de France and the municipality of Gennes-Val-de-Loire to organise artist-in-residence programmes on the Loire Valley cultural landscape and its portrayals. These were hosted beside the Loire, at La Colombière, where the sculptor Gustave Pimienta lived and worked for about thirty years until 1982.

In 2020 and 2021, Mission Val de Loire and the federation of Maisons de Loire organised a week of educational activities for 8-12 year-olds (i.e. primary school and Year 7 classes - French CE2, CM1, CM2 and 6e). Around the construction of a cardboard scale model of a traditional Loire barge, this initiative aimed at improving understanding of what links people, the river and its landscapes.