Explorer Marseille

The Old Port of Marseille is the city's natural harbour, the cove where Greek settlers from Phocaea landed around 600 BC. Fort Saint-Jean and Fort Saint-Nicolas, built under Louis XIV, guard its mouth. Too shallow for 19th-century steamships, it lost its trade to the new docks of La Joliette, and its quays at the foot of the Canebière have been largely pedestrian since 2013.

Marseille Cathedral, known as La Major, is the seat of the Archdiocese of Marseille, built between 1852 and 1896 in a Romanesque-Byzantine style to designs by Léon Vaudoyer and Henri-Jacques Espérandieu. Its striped stonework, domes and twin towers face the sea beside the Joliette docks, and part of the smaller 12th-century Romanesque cathedral still stands alongside it.

The Abbey of Saint-Victor is a fortified church on the south side of Marseille's Old Port, on the site of a monastery founded around 415 by John Cassian. Its crenellated towers date from the Middle Ages; beneath the upper church, crypts built in the remains of a 5th-century basilica hold early Christian sarcophagi and the Black Madonna carried out each year at Candlemas.

Cosquer Méditerranée is a reproduction of the Cosquer Cave, a decorated prehistoric cave in the Calanques whose entrance lies 37 metres under the sea, revealed in 1991. Opened in 2022 in the Villa Méditerranée by the harbour, it takes visitors in small exploration modules along a 220-metre route past copies of the paintings and engravings of horses, bison, seals and penguins.

The Mucem, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, is a national museum opened in 2013 at the entrance to Marseille's Old Port. Its main building, a 72-metre cube wrapped in a lattice of fibre-reinforced concrete by Rudy Ricciotti, is linked by a footbridge to the 17th-century Fort Saint-Jean, and shows collections on Mediterranean history and cultures.

Notre-Dame de la Garde is a Catholic basilica on a 149-metre limestone hill south of Marseille's Old Port, built from 1853 to plans by Henri-Jacques Espérandieu on the site of an old fort. A Romanesque crypt cut into the rock lies beneath a Neo-Byzantine upper church with mosaics, and the bell tower carries an 11-metre gilded statue of the Virgin and Child.

The Palais du Pharo is a Second Empire residence on a headland at the entrance to Marseille's Old Port, begun in 1858 for Napoleon III and almost finished when the Empire fell in 1870. The building is now a congress centre and is not open for visits; its public garden, the Jardin Émile Duclaux, surrounds the palace and overlooks the harbour and Fort Saint-Jean.

The Palais Longchamp is a monument in Marseille's 4th arrondissement, completed in 1869 to plans by Henri Espérandieu to mark the arrival of water from the Durance through the Canal de Marseille. A curved colonnade links a central water tower and cascade fountain to two wings that house the Musée des Beaux-Arts and the natural history museum, with the Parc Longchamp behind.

The Stade Vélodrome is the home ground of Olympique de Marseille, opened in 1937 and covered with a roof during the renovation completed in 2014, which raised its capacity to about 67,000. It has hosted matches of the 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups and of Euro 2016. A stadium tour leads to the dressing rooms, the press room, the pitchside and the club's trophies.

The Château d'If is a fortress on the small island of If in the Bay of Marseille, built between 1524 and 1531 on the orders of Francis I to defend the coast. It served as a state prison until the late 19th century and is a setting of Alexandre Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Boats from the Old Port take visitors to the island, its ramparts and former cells.