Explorer Arles

The Church of St. Trophime is the former cathedral of Arles, built between the 12th and 15th centuries on the site of a 5th-century basilica, with a Romanesque nave and a Gothic choir. Its west portal on the Place de la République, carved around 1180-1190, shows the Last Judgement; the church and its cloister are part of the UNESCO-listed monuments of Arles.

The Roman Theatre of Arles was built under Augustus and completed around 12 BC in the heart of the ancient city. It seated about 8,000 people; after serving as a stone quarry in the Middle Ages it keeps its stage area, orchestra, rows of seats and two standing columns. The Venus of Arles was found here in 1651, and festivals use it in summer.

The Arles Amphitheatre is a Roman arena built at the end of the 1st century AD for about 21,000 spectators, an oval of 136 by 107 metres with two tiers of 60 arches. In the Middle Ages it became a fortified quarter with houses inside, whose towers still rise above the arcades; cleared in the 19th century, it again hosts bullfights and summer shows.

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 Alyscamps is the Roman and medieval necropolis of Arles, which lay along the Via Aurelia outside the city walls and received burials from the 1st century BC to the 15th century. An avenue lined with stone sarcophagi leads to the Romanesque church of Saint-Honorat; Van Gogh and Gauguin both painted the site in 1888.

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.

Montmajour Abbey is a former Benedictine monastery founded in 948 on a rocky hill north of Arles that was once an island in the marshes. The site spans graves cut into the rock, the 11th-century hermitage, the 12th-century church and crypt, the Romanesque cloister, the 14th-century Pons de l'Orme tower and the ruins of an 18th-century monastery.