Explorer Grenoble

The Musée dauphinois is a museum of the history and cultures of the Dauphiné and the Alps, founded in 1906 by the ethnographer Hippolyte Müller. Since 1968 it has occupied Sainte-Marie d'en-Haut, a 17th-century convent of the Visitation nuns on the slope below the Bastille, with a baroque chapel, a cloister and terraced gardens above the city.

The Musée de Grenoble is the city's museum of fine arts and antiquities, founded in 1798 and housed since 1994 in a building by the Grenoble firm Groupe 6 on the bank of the Isère, beside the Tour de l'Isle of 1401. Its collections run from ancient Egypt to contemporary art, with works by Rubens, Zurbarán, Matisse, Picasso and Warhol, and a sculpture garden.

The Bastille is a 19th-century fort on a hill 264 metres above Grenoble, built from 1824 under General Haxo on the site of a 16th-century stronghold. It is reached on foot or by the cable car from the city centre, opened in 1934 and running spherical cabins, the 'bubbles', since 1976. Its ramparts and terraces look over the city and the Alps.