🇫🇷 France · South (Provence and the French Riviera)
Marseille is not like any other French city, and that is its charm. It is the oldest in the country —founded by Greek sailors more than 2.600 years ago— the most Mediterranean and the most mixed: a port of pale stone and intense light where accents, kitchens and music from Italy, the Maghreb, Armenia, the Comoros and half the world live side by side. For a long time it had a bad reputation; today it is one of the most vibrant and honest cities in Europe, without the postcard varnish of other Provençal destinations.
The heart of it all is the Vieux-Port, the old harbour where the fishing boats tie up and from where you can see, up above, the golden basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde watching over the city. Around it opens a fan of experiences: the maze of lanes in Le Panier, the oldest quarter; the modern MuCEM linked by a footbridge to Fort Saint-Jean; the fish markets; and, a step away, the Calanques National Park, those white cliffs dropping into turquoise water that you explore on foot or by boat.
This guide covers Marseille with a practical eye and no clichés: how to get around by metro and tram, how to reach the calanques (and why you have to book in summer), where to eat a real bouillabaisse, how to visit the Château d'If that Alexandre Dumas made famous and how to make the most of a diverse, port city full of life that rewards anyone who walks it with curiosity.
Marseille is the oldest city in France: it was founded around 600 BC by Greek sailors from Phocaea, in Asia Minor, who called it Massalia and turned it into a prosperous trading colony. Allied with and later subdued by Rome, it went on being a great Mediterranean port for centuries. It lived through one of the worst tragedies in its history in 1720, when the plague, arriving on the ship Grand-Saint-Antoine, killed tens of thousands of people. In 1792, during the French Revolution, a battalion of volunteers from Marseille marched to Paris singing the anthem that would be forever associated with the city: La Marseillaise. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as a great colonial and immigration port, Marseille took in waves of new arrivals from Italy, Armenia, the Maghreb and Africa who gave it its mixed character. During the Second World War, the Nazis dynamited part of the harbour quarter in 1943. Today it is a diverse metropolis in the middle of a transformation, whose full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Mediterranean south: Greek Marseille, the Roman Province, the popes of Avignon, the crusade against the Cathars of Carcassonne and the invention of the French Riviera, from Nice to Cannes.
Read the history of South (Provence and the French Riviera) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before France existed, before Rome was even a power, there was already a city on the natural harbour of Marseille. It was founded around 600 BC by Greek sailors from Phocaea, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor (in present-day Turkey). They called it Massalia, and with it was born what is today the oldest city in France, with more than 2.600 years of continuous history.
A fine legend, recorded by ancient authors, tells how the city was founded. The Phocaean sailor Protis reached the coast on the very day when Nannos, king of the local Ligurian tribe, was holding a banquet to marry off his daughter Gyptis. By custom, the young woman had to choose a husband by handing a cup of water to the man she picked: and she offered it to the newly arrived Greek. Out of that union between the Greek and the indigenous world, Massalia was symbolically born. Legend aside, what is certain is that the Phocaeans chose a privileged spot: a well-protected inlet (today's Vieux-Port) on a rocky, easily defended coast.
Massalia soon became a prosperous trading city, a republic governed by an aristocracy of merchants. From here the Greeks spread the vine, the olive tree, writing and coinage across Gaul, and in turn founded colonies further east, such as Nikaia (Nice) and Antipolis (Antibes). It was from Massalia that, around the 4th century BC, the explorer Pytheas set out, sailing the Atlantic as far as the British Isles and the lands of northern Europe, leaving one of the first accounts of those seas. For centuries the city was the great bridge between the Mediterranean world and inland Gaul.
For centuries, Massalia was an ally of Rome and kept its independence and its Greek institutions. But that autonomy ended in 49 BC, in the middle of the Roman civil war: the city had the misfortune to take Pompey's side against Julius Caesar. Caesar besieged it by land and sea, conquered it and stripped it of most of its privileges and territories. From then on, although it went on being a cultural and commercial centre, Massalia (latinised as Massilia) was overshadowed by other Roman towns in Provence, such as Arles.
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the city went through difficult centuries of invasion and decline. It was sacked, changed hands between different peoples and lost population. An important milestone of that period is the founding of the abbey of Saint-Victor, around the 5th century, by John Cassian, one of the first great monasteries of Christian Gaul; its fortified church, rebuilt in the Middle Ages, still stands beside the Vieux-Port and is one of the oldest buildings in the city.
During the Middle Ages, Marseille gradually recovered its role as a Mediterranean port. It saw the boom of trade with the East, took part in the traffic of the Crusades and formed part of the county of Provence. In 1481, Provence —and with it Marseille— was incorporated into the kingdom of France. The city always kept a strong character of its own, unruly towards central power, which would show itself again and again in its history. In the 17th century, after several revolts, Louis XIV asserted his authority by building the Saint-Nicolas and Saint-Jean forts at the entrance to the harbour, with the guns pointing both out to sea and at the city itself.
The most tragic episode in the history of Marseille began in May 1720, when a merchant ship, the Grand-Saint-Antoine, docked in the port on its way back from the Near East with a cargo of cloth and several crew members already dead from a disease on board. Despite the quarantine rules the city itself had developed to protect against epidemics, commercial interests and pressure from the traders meant the cargo was unloaded early. It was a fatal mistake.
Bubonic plague spread through the city with devastating speed. Within a few months an enormous share of the population died: the epidemic is reckoned to have killed around 40.000 or 50.000 people in Marseille, out of some 90.000 inhabitants, and about 100.000 across Provence as a whole. The streets filled with corpses that there was neither time nor hands to bury; galley slaves and prisoners were used to remove the bodies and dig mass graves. A sanitary wall, the 'mur de la peste', was even built to try to isolate the region.
The plague of 1720 was one of the last great plague epidemics in Western Europe, and it was engraved on the city's collective memory. Marseille took decades to recover its population. The episode left a bitter lesson about the tension between trade and public health, a dilemma this port city would meet again and again through its history. The Grand-Saint-Antoine was burned and sunk off the islands; in the 20th century its remains were found underwater.
Marseille, with its unruly tradition and strong identity, joined the French Revolution of 1789 with enthusiasm. But its most famous contribution to the history of France has to do with a song. In April 1792, after war was declared on Austria, an officer named Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed a war song in Strasbourg for the Army of the Rhine, originally titled 'Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin'.
That summer, a battalion of some 500 volunteers (the 'fédérés') set out from Marseille for Paris to defend the Revolution. On the march they sang that song, which fired up and united the soldiers. When they entered Paris singing it, Parisians began calling it simply 'La Marseillaise' —the song of the people of Marseille— and under that name it went down in history. La Marseillaise was declared the national anthem of France in 1795 and, after some back and forth, has been so definitively since 1879. Its impassioned words and its melody became a universal symbol of freedom and resistance.
So, although the anthem was composed in Strasbourg, it was the volunteers from Marseille who carried it to the capital and gave it its name and its fame. It is one of those twists of history by which a southern port city was tied forever to the sound symbol of the whole nation. The Revolution, however, also brought repression to Marseille, which was later punished by central power for its federalist revolts, in the eternal tension between the rebel city and Paris.
The 19th century turned Marseille into one of Europe's great doors onto the world. France's conquest of Algeria from 1830 and, above all, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made its port the main link between France and its colonies in North Africa, Asia and the East. The great docks of La Joliette were built, able to receive steamers and goods from all over the planet: sugar, oils, soap, spices, cotton. Marseille grew rich, expanded and filled with factories and workers.
That dynamism also made it a city of immigration like few others in France. Waves of Italians arrived (above all from the south and the islands), who were for a long time the largest foreign community; Armenians fleeing the genocide of 1915; Greeks, Corsicans, Spaniards. Through the 20th century, powerful flows of migrants from the Maghreb —Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans— from sub-Saharan Africa, from the Comoros and elsewhere were added. Each community left its mark on the neighbourhoods, the cooking, the music and the city's particular accent.
That mix is today Marseille's badge of identity: a Mediterranean, working-class, mixed city, very different from the rest of France, proud of its diversity and also cut through by social tensions, inequality and episodes of poverty and of violence linked to trafficking networks. The famous Marseille soap (savon de Marseille), made with olive oil, is a reminder of that industrial and commercial power that made the city great in the 19th century.
The 20th century brought Marseille light and shadow. During the Second World War, after the German occupation of the southern zone in 1942, the city lived through one of its darkest episodes. In January 1943, the Nazis, with the support of the French police, carried out a large round-up in the Vieux-Port quarter: tens of thousands of people were evicted, thousands were arrested and deported —many to the extermination camps— and the whole strip of old houses next to the harbour, seen as a nest of resistance and clandestine activity, was dynamited and razed. That wound changed the face of the old port forever.
Marseille was liberated in August 1944. The post-war years brought reconstruction, industrial growth and new waves of immigration, above all after Algerian independence in 1962, when hundreds of thousands of repatriates and Algerians arrived. The city grew northwards with large housing estates, and an iconic work of modern architecture also dates from that period: Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, the 'Cité Radieuse', finished in 1952.
In recent decades, Marseille has gone through a remarkable process of transformation and of reclaiming its image. The great Euroméditerranée urban project renewed the old docks; in 2013, the city was European Capital of Culture, which drove landmark facilities such as the MuCEM, the Villa Méditerranée and the remodelling of the Vieux-Port. In 2012, the Calanques massif was declared a National Park. Today Marseille presents itself to travellers as what it always was: a city both ancient and young, a port city, luminous, diverse and authentic, proudly claiming its Mediterranean character and its status as a world city.