Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (Bouches-du-Rhône)
Marseille is the French city that doesn't especially want to be French. Read more
The oldest continuously used harbour in France and the city's living room. Do the full loop at dusk — the reflection under the Ombrière and the basilica lit above the south quay.
France's largest open-air graffiti gallery, free and permanently rewritten. Skip the square, walk the alleys — that is where the work is.
Free, five minutes from the Mucem, and the striped Byzantine bulk of it is the most photographed silhouette on the Joliette waterfront.
The postcard Marseille that is still a real working port. Come down the stairs at sunset, when the viaduct backlights and the whole cove turns orange.
A Louis XIV fort you can walk for free, with two spectacular footbridges and the sharpest ground-level view of the harbour mouth.
An hour's walk that gives you the whole coastline, five swimming coves and the world's longest bench. The single best free thing to do in Marseille.
The most beautiful building in Marseille, hiding two museums that are now free to everyone. Sit in the courtyard even if you skip the collections.
The building and the sea-crossing footbridge are the point — and both are free. Pay only if a temporary exhibition grabs you.
The only way anyone will ever see this cave — the original is drowning, and the replica is a genuinely well-made piece of dark-ride museum craft.
The biggest, least curated market in Marseille, on the square that the neighbourhood fought city hall over for three years. Go on a Saturday morning.
A 49-seat cinema, a 5,200-disc video club and a bar in one co-operatively run building. Nothing else in Marseille programmes like this.
The best cooking-per-euro in the neighbourhood and possibly the city. A dozen tables, a handwritten menu, and fish that was in the sea yesterday.
The most serious meat cooking in the quarter, in a butcher's shop, by a chef who took the trade's oldest cliché and put it on the sign.
The reference Marseille bouillabaisse, on the quay it belongs on, from the same family since 1952. Order the bourride if you have done bouillabaisse before.
A canteen at lunch and a natural-wine small-plates bar at night, both good. The neighbourhood's default answer to 'where should we eat?'.
Two sandwiches a day, one of them vegetarian, on the best bread in the quarter. The cheapest genuinely good meal on this hill.
A gallery, a residency programme and a cocktail bar in one room on the Cours, with Thursday DJ sets and a crowd that lives here.
The city's landmark queer club, with a real safer-space charter and programming that swings from drag kings to techno depending on the night.
