Rue Kervégan, Pedestrian street in central Nantes, France
Rue Kervégan is the main street of the former Île Feydeau in Nantes, running east to west from rue Léon-Maître to place de la Petite-Hollande. It is lined with 18th-century buildings, about ten of them listed or registered as monuments historiques. The narrow cobbled roadway passes the wide cours Olivier-de-Clisson, roughly thirty metres across, which breaks its continuity.
The street took its name in 1817 from Danyel de Kervégan, a merchant and former mayor of Nantes who made his home here. This naming reflected the area's growing importance as a commercial passage through the city center.
Multiple buildings along the street, including numbers 9, 11, 13, 19, 21, and 28, contain architectural elements registered as historical monuments.
Rue Kervégan runs east to west across the former Île Feydeau, from rue Léon-Maître to place de la Petite-Hollande. Cours Olivier-de-Clisson, about thirty metres wide, cuts across it and breaks the street's continuity. The western stretch is the narrow cobbled part between the stone buildings; the eastern end was only joined to the old Île de la Saulzaie in 1823.
The street was first called rue du Milieu, then split into rue de Rohan and rue Desilles in the west and rue de Montfort in the east before being reunified on 1 December 1817 under the name of Danyel de Kervégan, a slave-trading shipowner and former mayor who lived and died there. In 1901 the former Petite rue Bon-Secours was absorbed into it.
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