Explore Arles

The Museon Arlaten is a museum of Provençal life founded in 1896 by the poet Frédéric Mistral, who used his Nobel Prize money to move it into the Hôtel de Laval-Castellane, where it opened in 1909. Costumes, furniture, tools and everyday objects tell the history of the Arles region, and the courtyard holds remains of the Roman forum. It reopened in 2021.

The Musée Réattu is the fine arts museum of Arles, housed in the former Grand Priory of the Knights of Saint John on the Rhône quay, which the Arles-born painter Jacques Réattu bought as his studio; the city has owned it since 1868. It shows Réattu's paintings, 57 drawings by Picasso, and a photography collection begun in 1965.

The Musée de l'Arles antique presents the archaeology of Roman Arles in a blue-clad building by Henri Ciriani, opened in 1995 on the site of the Roman circus beside the Rhône. Its collections include statues, mosaics and carved sarcophagi, and a later extension displays the Arles-Rhône 3, a 31-metre Gallo-Roman barge raised from the river in 2011.