Marseille travel guide

Top 10 sights in Marseille

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Château d'If

   A fortress of the 1520s on an island a mile and a half off the city, built to guard the harbour and used for three centuries as a prison, largely for Protestants and political detainees. Dumas put the Count of Monte Cristo in it, and the cell is duly shown.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© lienyuan lee · CC BY 3.0

   Notre-Dame de la Garde

   A Romano-Byzantine basilica of 1864 on a limestone outcrop a hundred and fifty metres above the port, topped by a gilded Virgin eleven metres high. Marseille calls her the Good Mother, and the walls inside are covered in ex-voto plaques from sailors and their families.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Guiguilacagouille · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Marseille Cathedral

   One of the largest cathedrals built anywhere in the nineteenth century, put up between 1852 and 1896 in striped green and white stone in a Byzantine manner. Half the medieval cathedral was demolished to make room for it, and what survives stands beside it.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Calanques National Park

   A national park created in 2012 over the limestone inlets southeast of the city and the sea in front of them — the first peri-urban national park in Europe, with a city of nearly a million at its gate. The calanques are reached on foot, by boat or not at all.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© Olena Ilnytska · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations

   A museum of Mediterranean civilisations opened in 2013, in Rudy Ricciotti's black concrete lattice cube on the harbour mouth, joined by a high footbridge to the old fort. Its subject is the sea as a single cultural space rather than a border.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Georges Seguin (Okki) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cosquer Cave

   A cave in a calanque whose entrance is thirty-seven metres below sea level, found by a diver in 1991, holding paintings and engravings of about twenty-seven thousand years ago — including seals and auks, made when the shore was far out and the cave was dry. A full-scale replica opened in 2022.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© Unknown · CC BY 2.5

   Massalia

   The Greek colony founded about 600 BC by settlers from Phocaea, which makes Marseille the oldest city in France. Its port, walls and a stretch of road are exposed in the garden of remains behind the modern harbour.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Bjs · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Abbey of St. Victor

   An abbey founded in the fifth century over the graves of martyrs, whose crypt is the oldest Christian structure in France still in use — early sarcophagi, a shrine and rock-cut chambers. The black Virgin is carried through the streets at Candlemas, when the bakery opposite sells green boat-shaped biscuits.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Jan Drewes (www.jandrewes.de) · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille

   The city's main art museum, in one wing of the Palais Longchamp, holding sixteenth- to nineteenth-century painting and sculpture with a strong Provençal section — including Daumier, who was born in Marseille, and the plague pictures of 1720.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© Robert Valette · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Fort Saint-Jean

    A fort of 1660 at the mouth of the old port, built by Louis XIV after the city rebelled — with its guns trained on Marseille rather than the sea, which the inhabitants noticed at the time. Two footbridges now link it to the museum and the old quarter.

    TiqetsKlook

Popular tickets & tours in Marseille

Live products and prices are provided directly by Klook.

KlookOpen Marseille activitiesBrowse tickets & toursKKdayOpen Marseille activitiesBrowse tickets & tours

Trending now

Based on 2025 Wikipedia pageviews — popular places beyond the top 10.

1. 

   1© Remontees · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Palais du Pharo

   A palace begun in 1858 by Napoleon III for the Empress Eugénie on the headland west of the old port, finished just as the Second Empire collapsed in 1870. It is now a conference centre, and its lawn gives the best view straight down the harbour.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Vincent 13 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   La Vieille Charité

   A former almshouse in the middle of the Panier quarter of Marseille, now a museum and cultural centre. Pierre Puget designed it and it was built in the baroque manner between 1671 and 1749, with three storeys of arcaded galleries enclosing a chapel under an oval dome.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3

   Jardin des Vestiges

   A garden of ancient harbour remains behind the Centre Bourse in the 1st arrondissement of Marseille. Excavated in 1967 and scheduled as a monument, it opened formally on 17 October 2009, showing the Greek quay wall and the freshwater basin of the Hellenistic port.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© Houss 2020 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Porte d'Aix

   A triumphal arch finished in 1839 at the point where the road from Aix entered the city, designed on Roman models and carrying reliefs of French victories. It stands in a redeveloped square where the motorway now arrives.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5

   Fort Saint-Nicolas

   A fort guarding the entrance to the Old Port of Marseille. Louis XIV had it built together with Fort Saint-Jean opposite, after the revolts of 1630-31 and the Fronde — its guns pointed at the city as much as at the sea.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Rbert Valette · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Église Saint-Ferréol les Augustins

   Church on the Old Port of Marseille, built for the Augustinians from 1369 and given its present facade in 1804. Its floor lies well below street level, the ground having risen.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7

   Musée Cantini

   A modern art museum in a seventeenth-century mansion, open since 1936 and strong on surrealism — Ernst, Miró, Masson and the artists who passed through Marseille in 1940 and 1941 waiting for visas out of Europe.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Alpha du centaure · CC BY 2.0

   Plages du Prado

   A stretch of artificial beach and park south of the centre, created in the late 1970s from the spoil dug out of the city's two metro lines. It gave a city with a rocky shore forty hectares of usable coast, and it is where Marseille actually swims.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9

   French Foreign Legion Museum

   A military museum at Aubagne outside Marseille covering the history and campaigns of the French Foreign Legion, through its collections and displays. About twenty-five thousand people visit each year, and the Legion's headquarters stands on the same site.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© JohnLuke · CC BY 3.0

    Parc Borély

    A seventeen-hectare municipal park in Marseille, listed by the Ministry of Culture among the remarkable gardens of France. It runs from an eighteenth-century château down towards the Prado beaches, with a French formal garden, an English park and a botanical garden inside it.

    TiqetsKlook