Nantes is a city in the Loire-Atlantique department of France on the Loire, 50 km from the Atlantic coast. The city is the sixth largest in France, with a population of 320,732 in Nantes proper and a metropolitan area of nearly 1 million inhabitants. With Saint-Nazaire, a seaport on the Loire estuary, Nantes forms one of the main north-western French metropolitan agglomerations.