In Loire · INSEE / geo.api.gouv.fr
Firminy is the city closest to the sea in Loire, at 202 km, ahead of Le Chambon-Feugerolles (203 km) and Saint-Étienne (207 km). At the other end, Roanne is the city furthest from the sea, at 275 km.
| Rank | City | Distance to the sea | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Firminy | 202 km | 17,060 |
| 2 | Le Chambon-Feugerolles | 203 km | 12,314 |
| 3 | Saint-Étienne | 207 km | 173,136 |
| 4 | Saint-Chamond | 214 km | 35,646 |
| 5 | Saint-Just-Saint-Rambert | 214 km | 15,764 |
| 6 | Andrézieux-Bouthéon | 219 km | 10,425 |
| 7 | Rive-de-Gier | 221 km | 15,242 |
| 8 | Montbrison | 226 km | 16,123 |
| 9 | Riorges | 274 km | 11,139 |
| 10 | Roanne | 275 km | 35,409 |
The same ranking for the whole of France : The French cities closest to the sea · The French cities farthest from the sea
Scope: France, metropolitan and overseas, Corsica and the DROM included. This dataset holds every commune of 10,000 inhabitants or more, plus smaller communes famous enough to be household names, 1,131 in all. It is not the full list of 35,000 French communes, so a village can sit outside a ranking whose extreme it would otherwise hold. This particular ranking is metropolitan only: the distance to the coast is measured against the coastlines of the Hexagon and Corsica, which would put an overseas port thousands of kilometres from a sea it sits on, so no value is published for overseas France rather than a wrong one.
Method and sources: populations are the INSEE legal populations, boundaries and coordinates come from the IGN commune registry, both served by geo.api.gouv.fr. Density is the population divided by the commune's area; distances are measured as the crow flies from the commune's centre. Data read on August 28, 2026.