Situated south of Loire Valley and Nantes is one of France’s fast becoming popular tourist destination - The Vendée. The Vendée is blessed with endless golden beaches, warm blue sea, and temperatures hot as the South.

Considered the most famous living artist in Vendée, Raphael Toussaint is known for his unique naïve style where most of his artworks depict many of Vendée’s villages. Another great artist from Vendée is Régis Delène Bartholdi, who is known for his romantic paintings focused on desert themes. You can find his studio in a courtyard off the main square in the village of Beaulieu-sous-La-Roche.

All throughout summer, Maurice Savy welcomes tourists and locals alike to his garden studio. Maurice Savy is famous for his paintings depicting the seaside and marshland sites of the area surrounding Port-Bourgenay. His garden studio is also designed with a play space for kids to play around at and some friendly animals to visit.

Edwin Apps has been a resident of Marais Poitevin for almost forty years. Apps is known for his creations of amusingly clever paintings with varying themes from pilgrims to umbrellas, bishops to bald men, pilgrims to silent majority, and so on and so forth.

Several arts and crafts shops can be found in the Vendée region displaying a wide variety of local crafts that the region is famous for.

Coralie Sellier’s lettered creations that are magically enhanced with glittering patches of fabric and some gold wire are like displays of ancient manuscripts. Located inland from Brem-sur-Mer in the heart of the countryside, one can also find Christian Bourcereau’s poterie that offers a fantastic display of his studio pottery enhanced with glowing glazes of raku.

Beautiful traditional baskets of all shapes and sizes made by Daniel Breillat are exhibited in Fonteay-le-Comte near the Abbaye Royale. Several colorful frescoes by Danielle Aubin, a skilled and talented local resident, are on display at the narrow streets of the district of Ile Pénotte district at Les Sables. Colorful vases, dishes, bowls—all creations of Marie-Christine Grangiens are on display and for sale in her small studio in a small village situated between Aizenay and Beaulieu-sous-la-Roche.

Driftwood and shells enhanced by Sue’s embroidery and painted colorfully by Nick’s watercolors (Nick and Sue Pearson) are sold at many crafts fairs and markets. The author of Encylopaedia of Machine Embroidery Val Holmes makes nature-inspired images with the use of only the sewing machine and the thread. Her creations are also on display and for sale in various local markets and summer fairs.

Religious devotees are surely going to be amazed at the magnificent churches and chapels found in the region of Vendée.

There’s the Chêne-Chapelle or Chapelle de Chêne, which is a uniquely minute chapel in an oak tree with its porch grafted to it. The fairy-tale-like place of worship is located southeast of the equally famous Logis de la Chabotterie between the front of a normal house and a roadside.

Chapelle du Petit-Luc serves as a present-day memory of the 564 women, old people, and children who were killed while praying in a hilltop chapel and to all those who died in the post-Revolution civil war. Today the chapel’s windows retell the tragic events of the Vendée Wars.

In a small village northeast of St. Etienne is a barnlike chapel called Chapelle de la Tullévrière where on its windows is a memorial of the many local martyrs murdered by Republican soldiers in 1794.

Église Romane is located in one of the most beautiful villages in France—Vouvant. The Romanesque church is richly decorated with great statues from the fifteenth century and magnificent stone carvings in the eleventh-century crypt. Église Romane is always filled with tourists in the summer but understandably quieter during winter.

Completed in 1066, the Church of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame du Vieux) is elegantly set in a grassy churchyard. The church is famous for its seven-minute son-et-lumière performance with a French commentary explaining the wonderful murals, ochre, frescoes, and a great mixture of terracotta, which are believed to have been created in the thirteenth century.

Said to have been erected by two sailors in thanksgiving for surviving a shipwreck in the said spot, the twelfth- or thirteenth-century Chapel of Notre-Dame de Bourdevert is located just 4 km east from town. Inside the church is a model ship decorated by babies’ shoes from parents who came and prayed for the Virgin to guide and protect their babies’ first steps.

Another must-visit church in the region of Vendée is Église St-Nicolas-de-Brem, a Romanesque church built in 1020 by monks from St. Martin’s monastery. Although the church offers a simple interior décor, some twelfth-century frescoes were just recently revealed adding to its historical magnificence. One shouldn’t miss one of the few scenes depicting some women visiting Jesus in his tomb after his Resurrection.

The cathedral in Luçon is famous for its soaring white columns, graceful pyramidal roof, and beautifully painted pulpit. Richelieu became the bishop here from the year 1606 to1623. The great mixture of twelfth-to-the-eighteenth-century architectural designs and seventeenth-century statues and garlands make the church one of the tourists’ great stops.

Vendée is not going to be one of France’s top tourist destinations if not for its great cultural aspect. Vendée offers a never-ending list of sights for all those who wish to not only have a great and wonderful vacation but also learn a great deal about the people of the region.