Travel France: Marseille
Marseille has always been a lump of coal on Provence’s diamond coastline. It’s a boisterous, untamed metropolis, a fusion of every other city in the world with a twist of southern France and its reputation for grime and crime has meant tourists have never flocked there. However, things are fast changing in France’s oldest city and greatest port.
The TGV link, a hi-tech cruise-liner dock and an innovative budget airline terminal mean Marseille is now one of the best-connected towns in Europe. Massive inner-city regeneration is under way and a new ‘Mediterranean-style’ Marseille is becoming trendy for its ethnic diversity and love of offbeat culture. In fact, right now, Marseille is where it’s at.
Getting off the bus at the Gare Routier and heading down towards the Vieux Port, you could just as well be in downtown Marrakech or Algiers. The district is full of shops selling gold, Arabian fabrics and leather shoes for five euros, while a night in a hotel here costs ten. A few hundred metres further on and the boutiques are as chichi as anything lining a Parisian boulevard. It’s the sort of place where you can buy a Gucci handbag, a string of purple garlic and a squeaking marmoset in consecutive shops. Indeed, a few nods and winks in Marseille’s backstreets and you could probably buy Napoleon’s trousers or Paul Cézanne’s paintbrush.
This diversity is what makes Marseille so interesting. It’s a mishmash of peoples and architectural styles and from a heavy reliance on shipping has started to attract service industries and telecommunications companies. ‘It also has a very active film industry here; a lot of TV adverts are made in Marseille,’ says Pascale Gauthier-Keogh, public affairs officer at the city’s British Consulate.
Historically, Marseille has had a lot of visitors; most of them unwelcome. The Greeks landed there in 600BC and set up a trading post named Massalia from which Marseille derives its name. Waves of trade and conflict have washed through the city ever since and it has been besieged by the Romans, Saracens and Greeks, and been the destination for thousands of North Africans, Armenians, Jews and southern Europeans.
Everyone has left their mark, even if it’s just a few street names or something savoury at the patisserie. A departure point for many of the crusades, the Christians left an almighty pinstriped cathedral and high on a hill top overlooking the old port, the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.
From la Garde hill, you can watch the boats dock in the harbour and see the washing hanging from the tenement widows of the other side of the port known as Le Panier.
Among its narrow, crooked streets, the city’s artists live and ‘prices there have soared,’ says property advisor Thomas Sebaa from the Foncia agency. It has become Marseille’s ‘coolest’ quarter and is, ‘particularly desired by Parisians and foreigners who like the arty atmosphere.’
Football crazy
The city now has strong links with another gritty, culture-hungry port, Glasgow. Last year the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Liz Cameron, signed a co-operation agreement with the mayor of Marseille to exchange information and experiences about their cities’ plans for port regeneration.
There’s something very similar about the cities. They are both large docks with impressive histories and shared reputations for being earthy and fishy and of course both are beloved of football. Glasgow Celtic was the first and last Scottish club to win the European Cup and Marseille was the first and last French one.
Everywhere, there are posters and flags for Olympique de Marseille. Indeed, the most central site in the Vieux Port is the OM supporters’ café, covered in the sky blue and white of the team. Their stadium, the Stade Vélodrome, is a 20-minute walk from the centre along a wide tree-lined avenue and is a place of worship for most of the city although their hero, Zinedine Zidane, who was born in Marseille, never actually played for his local club.
A few hundred metres further out is one of Marseille’s most stunning landmarks, the enormous Cité Radieuse, designed by Swiss architect Le Corbusier and completed in 1952. Ostensibly it’s an enormous horizontal block of concrete built on stilts with slits for windows. Inside, however, it’s masterpiece of Modernism which houses 1,600 people in rows of two-level apartments ranging from a tiny bachelor pad to a flat for ten.
On the third floor there’s a restaurant, small hotel, mini supermarket and a row of trendy design companies, psychiatrists and architects’ studios. It was Le Corbusier’s solution to collective housing at a time when France had a severe shortage. In the foyer is a notice board packed with adverts pleading with owners to sell their apartments and on the top floor, there’s a roof terrace with running track and crèche. In fact, you need never leave the building.
An even smarter address in Marseille’s seventh and eighth arrondissements is the Corniche President John F Kennedy, which runs along the seafront and is lined with mansions, galleries and fish restaurants. As it turns its first corner, it heads over the picturesque Vallon des Auffes, a miraculously-peaceful harbour where you can try Marseille’s signature dish, the delicately scented bouillabaisse, at Chez Fonfon and watch the seagulls following the trawlers back out to sea.
While the Vallon des Auffes seems trapped in time, everything else in Marseille appears under construction. Work on the Rue de la République which began almost a year ago, connects the new port complex, Euroméditérranée, with the old port. The metro is to be expanded and the bus station is being redeveloped. Disruption winner by far though is the new tram network, set for completion by summer 2007 but which has caused hours of jams and agitated drivers for years.
The plan is to remove cars and pollution from the city centre and encourage tourists to arrive by other means.
Intriguing visit
Besides the luxury-liner docks, Marseille has France’s first purpose-built budget airport and was opened in September 2006 in an old freight warehouse. MP2, as it’s known, has all the shiny orange austerity of a no-frills airline. Passengers walk on concrete floors and carry their own luggage to the plane. Ryanair claims it alone will bring in one million passengers a year and has launched 13 routes out of MP2.
Dodging the big cruise liners are the passenger ferries, which take visitors on day trips to the nearby calenques (rocky inlets) and to the Ile d’If, a few minutes ride from the mainland. A fortress and then a prison, it was made famous by Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, whose fictional hero, Edmond Dantès escapes from the island. There’s even a hole through which he supposedly slid. It’s a forbidding place, bleached by the sun and home only to seagulls but for a few hours it’s an intriguing visit.
Other great trips from Marseille include a visit to the blue water and white cliffs of the calenques and the tiny resorts of the Côte Bleue, which hold annual sea urchin festivals in the spring. Further east are the classier seaside towns of Cassis, Sanary-sur-Mer, Bandol and La Ciotat where the Lumière brothers showed the world’s first film.
‘Marseille is great for people who like living in a big city. It’s multicultural and the people here are very proud. It’s not a Provençal city, it’s a very Latin, Mediterranean city and has a tradition for being open to foreigners,’ says Mme Gauthier-Keogh.
To fully appreciate Marseille, you need to stay for a week, enough time to eat a bouillabaisse, take a walk through the Arab quarters, the Vieux Port and Le Panier. Visit the Contemporary Art Museum, the extravagant fountains of the Palais Longchamp and Borély park or just sit on the dock, smelling the sardines and saffron and trying to glimpse the sea through the masts.
The city is gearing up for the next rugby world cup in 2007 and so is expecting a massive arrival of visitors. What it can’t quite accept yet is that hitherto disdainful Parisians have started buying second homes in the city to visit at weekends.
For tourist information about Marseille contact:
Office de Tourisme
4, La Canebière
Marseille 13001
Tel: 00 33 9 (0) 4 91 13 89 00
www.marseille-tourisme.com
HOW TO GET THERE
By air: British Airways, Ryanair and easyJet all fly to Marseille.
By train. Take the Eurostar from London, Waterloo to Paris Gare du Nord, then cross to the Gare de Lyon for a direct TGV to Marseille St-Charles. www.eurostar.co.uk
WHERE TO STAY
Le Petit Nice-Passédat,
Anse de Maldorme
Corniche John F Kennedy
Marseille 13007
Tel: 00 33 (0) 4 91 59 25 92
www.passedat.fr
Hôtel Le Corbusier,
280, Bd. Michelet
Marseille 13008
Tel: 00 33 (0) 4 91 16 78 00
www.hotellecorbusier.com
WHERE TO EAT
Chez Fonfon,
140, vallon des Auffes
Marseille 13007
Tel: 00 33 (0) 4 91 52 14 38
www.chez-fonfon.com
Chez Madie,
138 quai du Port
Marseille 13002
Tel: 00 33 (0) 4 91 90 40 87