Between Tours and Saumur, in the southwest of Touraine and on the borders of Anjou and Poitou, the Pays de Chinon is located in the Indre-et-Loire department, in the Centre-Val de Loire region. This territory is part of the Loire-Anjou-Touraine Regional Natural Park. The city of Chinon is 47 km southwest of Tours, 30 km east of Saumur, 80 km east of Angers, 85 km north of Poitiers. This is its location. As for its construction, Chinon was built on the slopes of the Vienne. It is a very large commune located in the heart of the community of communes and in the heart of the Regional Natural Park, on the edge of a vast national forest. The territory extends over the low-lying plateau of the Véron, in the shape of a triangle, the point of which is at the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire, at the level of Candes-Saint-Martin, and the base of which is covered by the state forest of Chinon at the level of Saint-Benoît-la-Forêt. In addition, there are ten or so municipalities located on the left bank of the Vienne and the town of Chouzé-sur-Loire, on the opposite right bank of the Loire. In the middle of the territory, Chinon looks like a small capital. Its fortress which dominates the city from its cliff marks with majesty the landscape.
Chinon and most of the villages in the area have white houses built in tuffeau, a limestone that contributes to their character. At the end of their exploitation, the quarries saw troglodyte dwellings being dug there. The tufa stone thus marks the local architecture in two ways.
Landscapes of character and inspiration
Following the small roads that criss-cross this territory, one discovers bucolic landscapes and preserved villages. It is a charming region integrated not only in the Regional Natural Park but also in the perimeter of the Loire Valley classified on the list of the world heritage by UNESCO, without forgetting a membership, for the city of Chinon, in the network of the Cities and Countries of art and history labeled by the Ministry of Culture. This shows its richness! Water and stone in particular have shaped and nourished the landscape and its inhabitants over the millennia. The parks of the castles, the cultivation of cereals and market gardening and of course the viticulture have developed on this soil. The presence of the Loire and the Vienne has largely contributed to this. Today, the banks of the Loire are a choice itinerary for cyclists, hikers and horseback riders and if the river trade has died out, pleasure boating has taken over and reveals unique views of the built, natural and agricultural heritage of this magnificent region.
Artists are inspired by this environment and appreciate the opportunity to recharge their batteries on these peaceful lands. One thinks of François Rabelais who sang about the country of Chinon and made it the setting for his Picrocholine wars. Closer to us, the musicians Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) and his wife Geneviève Joy (1919-2009) settled in Candes-Saint-Martin, in a house overlooking the Vienne river, where they spent about thirty years
A geological particularity: the tufa stone
The tuffeau stone characterizes the Loire Valley. This soft stone with its luminous reflections embellishes the landscape, gives the land a base that suits the vine and is easily sculpted. What is most visible are the castles, the religious buildings, the houses of the cities and the villages built in tufa. This stone declines, according to the light and the deposits of extraction, a whole range of nuances of the pearl white to the yellow straw. A fine-grained limestone, the tuffeau is made up of the remains of organisms and rock fragments brought to the sea by rivers in the form of alluvium. After 90 million years, the deposited sediments have undergone a settling whose pressure has generated a recrystallization and a cementing.
Since the Gallo-Roman era, tufa quarries have been exploited in Anjou and Touraine for the construction of buildings. The extraction of tufa reached its peak between the 11th and 19th centuries. It had totally disappeared in the middle of the 20th century. It was revived during the renovation of the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, in the 1960s. The white tufa used today in the Loire Valley is found in regular and homogeneous banks up to 40 m thick. As for the yellow tufa, formerly used for rural housing, it is no longer exploited.
Troglodyte memory of a geological time
Result of this very long and slow transformation of the sediment into rock, the tuffeau noble and unique material goes back in time. During the extraction works, we regularly find magnificent fossilized ammonites. In Chinon, the extraction of tufa is done in underground galleries. The layer being easily accessible, this method allows to save the agricultural land on the surface. Traditionally, the quarryman would attack the face of the quarry with a pick to extract slabs about 3 m high by 2.5 m wide by 0.4 m deep. These blocks were then cut manually on the spot into stones of various dimensions according to the uses. The cut stones were then taken out of the galleries and transported to the quays before being delivered by water on board the flat-bottomed barges.
The blocks extracted today by the cutting chains of modern cutters are three times bigger than those extracted with a pick and are no longer transported by water. But it is always at the level of the cutting faces at the bottom of underground galleries that the stone is broken up. Geological link between the millennia, the exploitation continues, typical troglodytic activity of the country of Chinon. The old abandoned galleries have become ideal cellars for wine growers or charming guest houses, even museums. Thus it is a whole memory in the rock...
