Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur are just three of the great men and women to have emerged from the towns and regions along EuroVelo 6: an exhaustive list would be impossibly long. Travellers will doubtless come upon the statues of famous people or see the plaques on the houses in which they were born: every town proudly proclaims its famous sons and daughters.

Perhaps the greatest of all these great people was Leonardo de Vinci, a visionary whose ideas were so far ahead of his times that many of the machines he invented would not become technically practicable until centuries after his death. De Vinci was born in Tuscany but he travelled widely around Europe, living off his genius and his taste for the arts. He spent the last years of his life at Amboise, close to King François 1^st, for whom he transformed the Château d’Amboise and drew up plans for the Château de Chambord. His house, the Clos Lucé, is a not-to-be-missed attraction along the “Loire à vélo” cycle route.