NATURE
TAKE THE CITY ON THE RIGHT SIDE
A BALCONY ON THE RIVER The most beautiful view of Bordeaux awaits you on the right bank as you stroll along the wild riverbanks or dine on the terrace of a guinguette café. From the stone bridge to the Chaban Delmas lift bridge, the Queyries and Brazza quays take on a bucolic aspect. Follow the rambling riverbank! Formerly cluttered with warehouses, the right bank was long shunned by the people of Bordeaux. This industrial suburb was a sorry sight compared to the alignment of noble facades bordering the winding river on the opposite bank. The arrival of the tram, the creation of the Botanical Gardens, the embellishment of the Bastide district and the installation of the Darwin “eco-system”, an experimental site, soon turned the tides. The right bank is now the site of urban adventures and outlines a walking path that can be explored on foot or bicycle, alongside a river which invites dreams of distant shores. Once you cross the stone bridge and have greeted the playful blue lion, a monumental sculpture by Xavier Veilhan, the Queyries quay waits below
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with its pier and riverside restaurant, the Estacade. Here you will find a shady alleyway running through the Angéliques Park, a sanctuary for Angelica heterocarpa, an endemic plant that is found only on the Atlantic coast of France. This vast riverside esplanade has preserved its wild banks; it is a Natura 2000 listed site. The footpath, lined with ash trees, willows, poplars and alders, offer openings to the riverbank even though the surrounding area is fencedin to preserve the fragile interlacing plant life. Devoted to recreation, the park houses a sports area, a restaurant “La Petite Gironde” and a guinguette café “Chez Alric” where one can contemplate the urban landscape of the left bank from a table beneath
BORDEAUX MOMENTS ! #01 I PRINTEMPS I 2016 I SPRING
the trees. From this point, you only have to branch off through a meadow to visit the Mediterranean greenhouses, the arboretum and the water lilies of the Botanical Gardens designed by the landscape architect Catherine Mosbach and architect Françoise-Hélène Jourda. Nearby this oasis, on the site of an abandoned military facility, the Darwin city complex buzzes with the sound of the thousand visitors it receives each day. Associations and entrepreneurs of a new generation, sensitive to the ecological transition and the solidarity economy, have invested this alternative hive. Co-working, organic grocery stores, spectacular graffiti art, skate parks jostle each other in an organised chaos where you can enjoy delicious hot chocolate and artisanal beers.
Continuing towards the Brazza quay and the lift bridge, within sight of the industrial fortress of the 1920s flourmills the Grands Moulins de Paris, the scenery evolves into a gardened area that is about to emerge from the soil. Those who are curious will converge on the naval shipyards, a beautifully crafted building for draining rainwater and an industrial hall which, when renovated, will house in the autumn the Fabrique Pola, a phalanstery of artists, designers and architects. This spring, the right bank keeps getting greener. The Angéliques Park now extends upstream from the stone bridge to the Saint-Jean Bridge. One can ramble along in the shade of a 700 metre-long pergola.