Le Creusot Montceau

Between the Morvandelle Mountain and the high hills of the Charolais opens a valley sprayed by two rivers, Dheune which passes by towards the Saône and Bourbince which joins the Loire. Fruit of a long and shaken geologic history, it collected in its sub-soil a real treasure of the nature: the coal.
This natural passage chosen by the engineers in the end of XVIII-th century during the organization of a canal intended to connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and this wealth in raw material exploited at the same time by the pioneers of industrial revolution are the ferments of the identity of Creusot Montceau.In few years new centred cities around the industrial activity have developed here: metal industry in Creusot, coalmines in Montceau, as well as an intense ceramic activity in the surrounding villages . Entrepreneurs' aristocratic places of residence, workers' housing, buildings and public buildings dedicated to the work, houses with ceramic decoration, compose a peculiar landscape. Especially since the industry today turned to high technologies has never invaded this region papered with a cheerful hedged farmland and decorated by the presence of the Canal of the Centre and the numerous lakes. A qualitative environment for a wide panel of activities centred on the industrial civilization: trails round by boat, visit of a former mine or a museum dedicated to the local industrial history, walk by tourist train, and circuit of the ceramic.
So much different ways to meet people from the past and the present that wrote and are still writing an important page of the economical history.

Creusot resounds as the symbol of the industrial revolution of the IX-th and XX-th centuries in Francefrom 1782 and the construction of a royal foundry of artillery until our days when the city specialized in the production of special metals for the advanced equipments, by way of the tremendous legend of Schneider, real emperors of the iron and steel. This fame that the glorious hammer pestle of 100 tons symbolizes, set up in the entrance of the city, deserves in Creusot to be an important pole of technical and cultural tourism: the castle of the Glass factory, the former crystal glass-making of the Queen Marie-Antoinette then place of residence of the Schneider family is today the Economy Museum, constituting so one of the most important French places of the industrial patrimony. With its park in the English way of 28 hectares dating from the beginning of century and its former melting furnaces of the crystal, transformed in the XX-th century into theatre and chapel, it is a magic place. Over the city, the Tourist Park of Coombs spreads out, 70 hectares, with the Train of the Two Valleys, the summer sled, the track of go-carting, games, drives.... for the amateurs of sport, sensations or idleness!