Explorer Marseille

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.

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.