Rennes

Places researched in this city

A selection of the 39 places we've researched in this city. The full set is in the Parroo app.

• Medieval gates
• Half-timbered streets
• Baroque & neoclassical squares
• Gothic churches
• Historic markets
• Arthurian forest

• Mordelaises Gates

  Before every Duke of Brittany was crowned, he had to pass through these gates and swear to defend Breton liberties, making them as much a constitutional symbol as a fortress. Built between 1442 and 1452 on the line of a Gallo-Roman wall, they are the best-surviving remnant of Rennes' medieval defenses.

• Lices Square

  In June 1337, a teenage Bertrand du Guesclin, who would later become Constable of France, famously unseated a dozen knights during jousts right here. The same square went on to host public executions, then a market from 1622, and today draws up to 14,000 visitors every Saturday.

• Rennes City Hall

  Jacques Gabriel designed this Baroque landmark between 1734 and 1743 to replace a city hall swallowed by the great fire of 1720, and Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech from it in 1944. Its central bell tower with a bulb-shaped dome and two symmetrical wings set the tone for the neoclassical reconstruction of the entire city center.

• Saint Peter's Cathedral of Rennes

  The cathedral's façade took several centuries to complete, with each level built in a different era between 1541 and 1678, yet the interior was only finished in 1845. It shelters a remarkable 1520 Flemish altarpiece and was one of the few buildings spared by the fire that leveled much of Rennes in 1720.

• Thabor Park

  Benedictine monks cultivated this hill as a horticultural garden from 1610, naming it after Mount Tabor in the Bible, before the French Revolution handed the land to the city in 1793. Landscape architects Denis and Eugène Bühler redesigned it in the 1860s, threading a rose garden of 2,000 varieties through ten hectares of French and English gardens.

• Saint-Georges Municipal Pool

  One of the oldest continuously active Art Deco pools in France, it was built between 1923 and 1926 directly on the demolished site of an 11th-century abbey church, a fact the city council kept quietly understated when approving the 2-million-franc project. The 96-metre mosaic frieze wrapping the interior is among the most ornate in any French public pool.

• Paimpont Forest (Brocéliande Forest)

  This 9,000-hectare forest southwest of Rennes is widely identified with Brocéliande, the woodland of Arthurian legend where Merlin is said to be entombed and where the Fountain of Barenton supposedly summons storms when its water is poured on a nearby stone. Medieval chroniclers placed key scenes from the Grail cycle here, and visitors have been turning up to test the fountain ever since.