Not surprisingly the aquarium is a magnet for families, and the massed tourists and serried ranks of weekend yachts, plus the antiquity of the Vieux Port, can create the impression that real shipping is a thing of the past.
Not so. Just as in Marseille or Nantes or Le Havre, the activity has simply moved with time to more convenient places, further from the centre.
Out at La Pallice the broad expanse of dockside is strewn with drying nets from the modern fishing fleet, while beside it lurks the sinister concrete bulk of the biggest World War Two German submarine base on the Atlantic.
Beyond this the installations of the commercial port - vast cereal silos, mountains of West African logs, isolated quays - loom out of the dunes and wild grasses between the seafront and the old fishing village of Laleu, now a quaint and slowly gentrifying suburb of the city.