Explore Marseille

About Marseille

Marseille is France's loud, sun-bleached, Mediterranean second city — a Greek-founded port (the oldest in France, established as Massalia in 600 BC) that has spent the past decade reinventing itself from rough-edged industrial harbour into one of the most culturally interesting urban projects in Europe. The Vieux Port still anchors everything: the working fishing harbour where boats unload their catch each morning at the Quai des Belges and where ferries leave for the Frioul Islands and the Château d'If (the Alexandre Dumas prison from The Count of Monte Cristo). Above it, the white limestone Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde — 'La Bonne Mère' — watches over the city from its highest hill. Down on the modern waterfront, the J4 esplanade is the city's transformed cultural heart: the lattice-cube MuCEM (Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean) connected by a vertiginous footbridge to the medieval Fort Saint-Jean, and the photo-friendly mirrored canopy at L'Ombrière by Norman Foster. The newly cleaned-up Le Panier old quarter and the genuinely innovative North-African-meets-Provence food scene at Cours Julien, the Calanques National Park's white limestone fjords to the south — best reached by boat from the Vieux Port — round out the picture.