Saint-Joseph de Porterie, Nantes — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Saint-Joseph de Porterie?

The église Saint-Joseph gave the bourg its shape. Plans came from the catalogue of the architect Joseph-Fleury Chenantais, a report of June 1845 records the church already going up, and Bishop de Hercé blessed it solemnly on 30 September 1846. The old château left its name.

Porterie, written Portricq in the older documents, comes from a castle whose much altered remains still stand in the bourg of Saint-Joseph. A school group opened in October 1911. Mayor Gabriel Guist'hau had it built once a descendant of René-François Le Lasseur agreed to sell the city a parcel, and it took in the children of municipal employees, of workers from the new factories, and of the poorer families in hamlets such as Gachet.

What is the history of Saint-Joseph de Porterie?

Digging in 2009 found a Gaulish enclosure ditch here, the first known in Nantes. Occupation runs back to the fifth century BC, and between the first and third centuries a gallo-roman farming estate of the villa rustica type stood on the same ground. Louis VI names the place in 1134.

The ecclesiastical domain belonged in the thirteenth century to Jean de Châteaubriant, seigneur des Roches-Baritaut, passed by marriage and inheritance to Jean Tournemine in the sixteenth, and was sold after the death of Tournemine's son François in 1529 to Geoffroy Drouet, the first mayor of Nantes. Michel d'Espinoze bought the seigneurie in the seventeenth century. His family's name survives on the hôtel de Portriq at the place Saint-Vincent in central Nantes, and the last seigneur sold the domain on 27 October 1787 to René-François Le Lasseur, a former avocat général at the Chambre des comptes who has a Nantes boulevard named after him.

Farms and hamlets were all there was in the early nineteenth century. The landowners petitioned the bishop in December 1844 because the parish church of Saint-Donatien lay nearly five kilometres off over poor roads, Nantes and its mayor Ferdinand Favre backed them in February 1845, and Louis-Philippe signed the ordinance creating the parish of Saint-Joseph de Portricq on 12 November 1845.

Where is Saint-Joseph de Porterie?

Saint-Joseph de Porterie lies north of the Nantes ring road between the left bank of the Erdre to the west and the route de Carquefou to the east, crossed by the route de Saint-Joseph, and belongs to the wider quartier Nantes Erdre.