Marseille: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Greeks from Phocaea sailed in around 600 BC, and the story they told is that their captain arrived on the day a local king’s daughter was choosing a husband; she handed him the cup, and the city was founded on that marriage. Marseille is therefore about six hundred years older than Paris and two thousand six hundred years old now — the oldest city in France, and it has never behaved like a French one. Two hours, and the hill at the end is steep.
Live camera
A short history of Marseille
Around 600 BC Greeks from Phocaea in Asia Minor arrived here and founded Massalia, the oldest city in France. In 49 BC Julius Caesar besieged it, and from then on it was a Roman port. In 1720 a ship from the East brought the plague, and half of the city's inhabitants died. In 1792 volunteers from the city marched to Paris singing a new anthem, which has since been known as "La Marseillaise". In 1943 the Germans blew up a large part of the old neighbourhoods next to the Old Port. Since the 1960s many Jews from North Africa have settled here, and the community is one of the largest in Europe.
The ten best sights in Marseille
-
1Notre-Dame de la Garde
Free, 154 metres up, and sailors still leave models of their boats
2MuCEM€11, a black concrete lace box, and the footbridge to the fort is free
3Fort Saint-JeanFree, and the gardens on top look straight into the harbour mouth
4Cathédrale La MajorFree, striped green and white, and it holds 3,000 people
5Abbaye Saint-Victor€2 for the crypt, and parts of it are from the 5th century
6Vieille Charité€6, a 17th-century poorhouse, and the chapel in the middle is free
7Palais LongchampFree outside, and it is a water tower dressed as a palace
8Musée des Beaux-Arts€6, in the left wing of Longchamp, and never crowded
9Musée Cantini€6, and the surrealists are the reason — Ernst, Miró, Bacon
10Musée d’Histoire€6, and a 2,300-year-old Greek ship is in it, found in 1974
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Marseille →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Marseille:
Free walking tours in Marseille
Older than France
Greeks from Phocaea sailed in around 600 BC, and the story they told is that their captain arrived on the day a local king’s daughter was choosing a husband; she handed him the cup, and the city was founded on that marriage. Marseille is therefore about six hundred years older than Paris and two thousand six hundred years old now — the oldest city in France, and it has never behaved like a French one. Two hours, and the hill at the end is steep.
- Vieux-Port · The Greeks moored in this exact inlet and the city has used it ever since — twenty-six centuries of continuous use, which almost nowhere else in Europe can claim. The mirrored canopy on the quay was put up in 2013 so that people would stand under it and look up at each other.
- Musée d’Histoire · In 1974 builders digging a car park hit the Greek harbour wall and a merchant ship from the third century BC, waterlogged and intact. The ship is in this museum, nineteen metres of it, and the dig outside the window is the harbour the Greeks built.
- Le Panier · In January 1943 the Germans gave the twenty thousand people living in the lower quarter one day to leave, then dynamited fourteen hundred and ninety-four buildings over seventeen days. What is left above the line is the oldest part of the city and was rebuilt by nobody.
- Vieille Charité · Built in 1671 to lock up the city’s beggars, who were rounded up and confined by law, and it ran as a poorhouse for two centuries. By 1950 it was a slum with families in the arcades; Le Corbusier campaigned to save it, and it was restored as a museum instead of demolished.
- Abbaye Saint-Victor · Founded in the fifth century over a quarry the Greeks had used as a burial ground, and the crypt still has the sarcophagi. Every second of February the city carries a black Virgin up from this crypt and the bakeries sell boat-shaped biscuits for the occasion — a custom with no documented origin.
- Notre-Dame de la Garde · The highest point in the city, a hundred and fifty-four metres, and the inside is hung with hundreds of ex-votos — painted boards, model ships, football shirts — left by people who survived something. Marseille calls the statue on top la Bonne Mère and the whole city can see her.
What they built on the docks
In 2013 Marseille was European Capital of Culture, and the city used it as cover for something larger: the biggest urban renewal project in southern Europe, five hundred hectares of dead port rebuilt over twenty years. For decades the waterfront north of the old port had been a wall of warehouses the public could not enter. It is now a line of museums, and the city that had the worst reputation in France stopped having it. Two hours, flat, and all of it on the water.
- Fort Saint-Jean · Louis XIV built it in 1660 with the guns pointing inland, not out to sea — he had just put down a revolt and wrote that the people of Marseille would be very fond of a good fortress. It was closed to the public for three hundred and fifty years and opened in 2013.
- MuCEM · A cube wrapped in a lattice of fibre-reinforced concrete cast so thin it reads as lace, and it is the first national museum France ever built outside Paris. The ramp spirals up between the lattice and the glass, which means you walk the whole building in shade with the sea flickering through.
- Cathédrale La Major · Striped green and white in a Byzantine style nobody had used in France, and built between 1852 and 1893 to hold three thousand — a statement of imperial confidence put on the dock where ships left for Algeria. The small Romanesque church beside it is the one it replaced, half demolished to make room.
- Regards de Provence · The building was the sanitary station where everyone arriving by ship from North Africa was stripped, showered and disinfected, from 1948 to 1971. The showers and the oven that heated their clothes are still in the basement and are part of the visit.
- La Joliette · The nineteenth-century docks are a single stone building three hundred and sixty-five metres long, one window for each day of the year — a British architect’s idea, copied from the London docks. It was offices and warehouses; it is now shops and a public arcade you can walk through.
- FRAC PACA · Kengo Kuma’s glass box, finished in 2013, in a quarter called the Belle de Mai that was tobacco factories and is now the densest concentration of studios in France. Entry is free, and so is the roof.
Limestone and water
South of the city the coast breaks into calanques — narrow inlets cut into white limestone, with water the colour of a swimming pool and no road to most of them. Twenty kilometres of this is a national park, the only one in Europe that covers land, sea and a city of a million people at the same time. In summer the dry ones are closed by the fire service at seven in the morning if the wind is up. Half a day, and you walk the last part.
- Corniche Kennedy · Five kilometres of road cut along the cliff in the 1850s to give work to the unemployed, and the bench running beside it is three kilometres long — officially the longest bench in the world. Local boys dive off the bridge at the Vallon des Auffes, which is illegal and has not stopped since the 1920s.
- Vallon des Auffes · A cove forty metres wide under a road bridge, with fishermen’s huts round it and about twenty boats still working. The name comes from the rope-makers who twisted hemp here; auffo is the Provençal word for the grass they used.
- Cité Radieuse · Le Corbusier finished it in 1952 as an experiment: three hundred and thirty-seven flats, a shopping street on the seventh floor, a school and a running track on the roof — a village stood on end. Marseille called it the madman’s house. People still live in it, and the roof is open to anyone.
- Plages du Prado · Marseille had almost no beach until the 1970s, when the spoil dug out for the first metro line was dumped into the sea here and shaped into twenty-six hectares of park and sand. It is free, it is the city’s own, and nothing about it is natural.
- Calanque de Sormiou · The largest of the calanques, with a few dozen cabanons — fishing huts built without permission over a century and now protected. Below the water at the next inlet is the Cosquer cave, whose painted walls are twenty-seven thousand years old and whose entrance is thirty-seven metres down.
- Calanque de Sugiton · So many people were coming that the path was eroding and the park now limits it to four hundred visitors a day in summer, free, booked online the day before. The walk down takes forty-five minutes and the walk back up takes an hour.
Getting to Marseille and getting around
- Marseille Provence · The shuttle to Saint-Charles is €10 and takes 25 minutes
- Saint-Charles · 104 steps down to the city, and Paris is 3:10 away
- Gare routière · Beside the station, and the buses to the calanques leave here
- Vieux-Port · Both metro lines cross here, and the ferry boat is €0.50
Cheap eats in Marseille
Eight counters where Marseille eats standing. The city invented the pizza slice sold from a window in France, it eats North African food more than French, and the local snack is a panisse — a chickpea-flour chip, fried, three euros a paper cone. Bouillabaisse is the opposite: a fifty-euro ritual with a charter, and the two live side by side.
- Marché des Capucins · Open every day, and lunch is under €8
- Chez Étienne · Cash only, lunch and dinner, and closed Sundays
- Le Femina · About €20, and booking is wise at lunch
- Fish market · On the quay from eight, and the fishermen sell their own
- Marché de Noailles · Street stalls every morning, and the cheapest food in the city
- Four des Navettes · €1 each, and they keep for a month
- Chez Fonfon · Bouillabaisse in the cove since 1952, and it is €65
- Maison Empereur · An ironmonger since 1827, and the oldest shop in France
Museums in Marseille
- MuCEM · €11, free on the first Sunday, and the fort is free always
- Musée d’Histoire · €6, and a 2,300-year-old Greek ship is the centrepiece
- Musée Cantini · €6, and it is a 17th-century private house
- Musée des Beaux-Arts · €6, in the Longchamp palace, and Daumier was from here
- Vieille Charité · €6, and the courtyard and chapel are free to walk into
- Château d’If · €6 plus €12 for the boat, and the sea can close it
- FRAC PACA · Free, Kengo Kuma’s glass box, and the roof is open
- Cité Radieuse · Free to enter, and the roof has a gallery and a pool
Nature and day trips near Marseille
Marseille has three hundred days of sun and a wind that can reach a hundred kilometres an hour — the mistral, which blows down the Rhône valley and is the reason the sky here is the colour it is. It also closes the calanques when the fire risk is high, and that decision is made at six every summer morning.
- Parc des Calanques · Free, and check the closure map the night before
- Calanque de Sormiou · Bus 23 then 45 minutes on foot, and no cars in summer
- Calanque de Sugiton · 400 people a day in summer, free, and booked the day before
- Îles du Frioul · €12 return from the Vieux-Port, and 20 minutes each way
- Parc Borély · Free, 17 hectares, a botanical garden and rowing boats
- Jardin du Pharo · Free, and the view back into the harbour mouth is the best
- Cassis · 30 minutes by train, and the boat to three calanques is €20
- Camargue · 90 minutes by car, and a train to Arles then a bus
Things to do in Marseille with kids
- Château d’If · €6 plus the boat, a real prison island, and 20 minutes out
- Plages du Prado · Free, shallow, lifeguards in summer, and a skate park on it
- Parc Borély · Free, a playground, a lake and bikes for hire
- Ferry boat · €0.50, every ten minutes, and it stops in bad wind
- Palais Longchamp · Free, a waterfall down the middle, and a park behind it
- Îles du Frioul · €12 return, and the swimming coves are shallow
Live music in Marseille
French rap came out of Marseille before it came out of Paris, and IAM from this city put the first French hip-hop album on the charts in 1991. The venues follow from that: a converted tobacco factory, a grain silo and a football ground that sings.
- La Friche Belle de Mai · The roof is free; concerts from €12
- Le Silo · Tickets from €25, and tram 2 goes to the door
- Opéra de Marseille · From €12, and the art deco interior is from 1924
- Stade Vélodrome · Tickets from €25, and the metro goes to the gate
- Cours Julien · Small venues round the square, and most nights have something
- Les Docks Village · Free to walk through, and concerts in the courtyards in summer
Nightlife in Marseille
- Cours Julien · The square that goes out, and the murals change monthly
- La Plaine · The square above it, and the city fought its rebuild for years
- Place aux Huiles · On the old port, and the terraces stay out late
- Le Panier · Quieter bars in the lanes, and the quarter closes early
- La Friche · The roof in summer, with a bar and the city below
- Corniche Kennedy · Where the evening is spent in summer, on the longest bench
Frequently asked questions about Marseille
What is there to see in Marseille?
The top sights in Marseille are Notre-Dame de la Garde, MuCEM and Fort Saint-Jean. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Marseille?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Marseille without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Marseille?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Marseille, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Older than France.
How do you get to Marseille and get around?
The main ways are Marseille Provence, Saint-Charles and Gare routière. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Marseille, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Marseille that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Marseille for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.