Saintes is a town in south-west France, in the Charente-Maritime département (Nouvelle-Aquitaine region). Its inhabitants are called Saintais and Saintaises.
The second-largest town in the département after La Rochelle, it has 25,288 inhabitants (2015) and heads an urban unit of 30,086 inhabitants and an urban area of 60,975 inhabitants (2008).
Watered by the Charente, on whose left bank the town first developed, it became the capital of the province of Saintonge until the Ancien Régime, before being named préfecture of the Charente-Inférieure département in the territorial reorganisation of 1790. Finally supplanted by La Rochelle in 1810, it was relegated to the rank of sub-prefecture but kept, by way of compensation, its role as the département's judicial seat. The town's economic influence then grew in the last third of the 19th century, when it was chosen as the seat of the 8th district of the State railways.
A major road, motorway and rail hub, Saintes is also the main economic centre of the middle of the département. While industry is only modestly represented (electronics, railway repair, lifting-equipment manufacturing), the town stands out above all as a dynamic service centre (State administration, assize court and judicial activities, banks and mutual insurers, educational establishments, hospital) and a commercial hub of regional scale (headquarters of France's largest consumer cooperative, Coop Atlantique).
Thanks to a major Gallo-Roman, medieval and classical heritage, Saintes has also become a popular tourist town, a member of the national network of towns and regions of art and history since 1990. Culture is not left behind: Saintes boasts several museums, a theatre, cinemas, many festivals and a European centre for musical research and practice housed in the heart of the Abbaye aux Dames.
