9th Stage – Monday 9th July 2012 Arc-et-Senans > Besançon – 41.5 km

Located at the foot of the Jura mountains, between the Chaux forest and the river Loue, Arc-et-Senans is a small Comtoise village. In addition to agriculture, particularly focused on cattle and grain farming, and a small woodworking industry, the economic life of Arc-et-Senans is largely orientated towards tourism thanks to the Royal Saltworks which annually attracts 130,000 visitors. With its eleven buildings constructed in the shape of half-moon that housed the production lines and workers’ housing, the Royal Saltworks was borne of the fertile imagination of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, visionary architect of the Enlightenment, and is a rare testament to the history of industrial architecture. Built at the request of King Louis XV, it was a factory for the production of salt that was transported from Salins-les-Bains, its point of extraction, and that were used at the time for the storing of food, the manufacture of glass and silverware, agriculture and medicine. Since 1982, the Royal Saltworks has been listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Frequently cited as a place "where life is good", nestled in an oxbow of the Doubs River and overlooked by the citadel of Vauban, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008, the capital of Franche-Comte, is firstly a historical centre with its rich architectural heritage. But Besancon, birthplace of Victor Hugo, is also a student town (20,000 students, more than one in five is a Bisontin), and a city of perpetual movement that offers its residents a hugely varied cultural life, a public transport network that will include the tram and a world respected teaching hospital. Besançon is considered the heart and soul of watchmaking. Even today, a whole industrial fabric of small and medium enterprises work on the design, manufacture and maintenance of watches and watch components. It is this long tradition of watchmaking that made Besançon a centre of technological excellence with expertise in micro technology and an internationally recognized expertise in the fields of nanotechnology and biomedicine.