Nanostructured organic ± inorganic hybrid materials have known a considerable expansion in the past decade, [1±5] because they may provide unique combinations of properties which cannot be obtained by other ways. Among the possibilities offered by this class of solids, the preparation of materials able to strongly chelate metal cations which could remain chemically accessible seemed to us to be of great interest. Indeed, such materials could be interesting to study the coordination chemistry within the solid state as well as for their potential applications in catalysis, [6] separations, [7] optical devices, [8] or magnetic properties for example. Such applications require the incorporation within the materials of a good chelating ligand. Saturated polyazamacrocycles and especially 1,4,8,11-tetraazacyclotetradecane [9±11] (cyclam) having attracted much attention because of their remarkable binding ability towards transition and heavy metal cations, we set out to prepare hybrid materials incorporating cyclam moieties by using the sol ± gel process.We have shown that nanostructured materials are kinetically controlled. [3, 4, 12] The texture of the solids is highly dependent on all the parameters able to modify the kinetics of polycondensation (catalyst, [13] concentration of the reagent, [13] solvent, [13] temperature, [13a] and the organic spacer [13] ). Furthermore, the importance of the organic moiety in the arrangement of solids obtained by the sol ± gel process was displayed, giving rise to a possible short-range organization. [3, 4, 14, 15] In this context, it seemed interesting to investigate the incorporation of metal salts into cyclam-containing hybrid materials by two routes: the hydrolysis and polycondensation of metal salt/silylated cyclam derivatives complexes (Scheme 1, route A) or by hydrolysis and polycondensation of silylated cyclam derivatives followed by the direct incorporation of metal salts into the xerogels (Scheme 1, route B).We have shown that the hydrolysis and polycondensation of silylated cyclam Cu II and Co II complexes (route A, Scheme 1) gives rise quantitatively to hybrid materials incorporating the Cu II and Co II salts, [16] thus the complexation of metal cations survives the sol ± gel process. Herein we describe the direct incorporation of CuCl 2 into hybrid materials (route B). By using X-ray fluorescence and ESR spectroscopy, we show that the two routes of incorporation of the salts are not equivalent Crystal data for 2 (C 171 H 206 Cl 10 Mn 10 N 20 O 57 ): M r 4357.46, dark brown crystal (0.35 Â 0.40 Â 0.55 mm), triclinic, space group P1 Å , a 14.5331(2), b 18.1704(1), c 21.3923(2) , a 76.545(1), b 74.220(1), g 86.025(1), V 5287.03(9) 3 , Z 1, T 293(2) K, 1 calcd 1.369 g cm À3 , F(000) 2248, m 0.782 mm À1 . Of the 28 654 reflections ((2q) max 50.148), 18 480 unique reflections were collected. From these, 9215 reflections with I b 2s(I) were used to solve the structure and were refined on F 2 by full-matrix least-squares techniques (SHELXL-97). At convergence, R 1...