# Saline royale: The ideal factory

- URL : https://www.inexpeditions.com/en/in100/l-usine-ideale
- Language : English
- Publisher : in:Expeditions SAS, 8 rue Lacépède, 75005 Paris, bonjour@inexpeditions.com
- Published : 2026-10-25
- Place : Saline royale, Arc-et-Senans, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, FR (https://www.salineroyale.com/)

> On the edge of the Chaux forest, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux designed a saltworks for Louis XV as an ideal city. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982, the…

The ideal factory

## Saline royale

salineroyale.com

On the edge of the Chaux forest, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux designed a saltworks for Louis XV as an ideal city. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982, the Royal Saltworks welcomes visitors, gardeners and artists, and houses groups right inside its walls.

Built from 1775 to 1779, the factory forms a semicircle around the director’s house: each building states a function, each vista an idea of order. The hotel has 31 rooms across three buildings of the site, and entry to the grounds comes with the booking.

The 13-hectare park holds some thirty gardens. Since 2022, the landscape project “Un Cercle immense” has made it a laboratory for landscape trades and a refuge for biodiversity. Ten meeting rooms and a restaurant let groups work on site. The regional train station is a hundred metres away, about 2 h 20 from Paris or Lyon.

Photo credits : Paul Keiffer (Unsplash) ; JGS25, Hyppolyte de Saint-Rambert, Chatsam, GO69 (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Source : https://www.inexpeditions.com/en/in100/l-usine-ideale · in:Expeditions, learning expeditions and impact retreats since 2015.