Arles Amphitheatre

Interesting facts

To make room for the amphitheatre, Roman engineers demolished part of the Augustan city wall built on the Hauture hill only a century earlier.

At 136 metres long it is larger than its famous neighbour at Nîmes, built slightly later, though the Nîmes arena survives in better condition.

The German traveller Hieronymus Münzer, passing through in 1495, found poor families living in huts tucked into the arches and on the arena floor.

When King Francis I visited Arles in 1516 he was dismayed to find so grand a building in such a wretched state.

The last houses leaning against the outer walls were demolished only on 30 December 1840.

Its listing as a historic monument in 1840 came at the urging of the writer Prosper Mérimée, then France's inspector of historic monuments.

A restoration lasting ten years and costing nearly 25 million euros ended in 2013, at the time one of the largest heritage projects in France.

Of the four medieval towers raised on the walls, the southern one was never restored.

Vincent van Gogh painted the crowd at a bullfight here in 1888; the canvas, Les Arènes, now hangs in the Hermitage.

In the 1850s the photographer Édouard Baldus recorded the arena for the Mission héliographique, the French state's pioneering 1851 photographic survey of monuments.

Why it is worth it

In the middle of Arles, the old Roman amphitheatre still dominates the city, its two tiers of arches curving around an oval arena. Built around AD 90, shortly after the Colosseum in Rome, it is about 136 metres long and 109 metres wide and held some twenty thousand spectators for gladiatorial combats and animal hunts. Each of its two levels has sixty arches, and behind them run galleries and stairways designed to fill and empty the stands quickly. The attic storey that once crowned it has gone, but the lower levels are remarkably complete.

The games continued for centuries: an emperor staged them here in 255, Constantine celebrated the birth of a son with hunts and fights, and as late as 539 a Frankish king had the ancient spectacles revived for his visit. Then insecurity turned the building into a fortress. Four towers were added, and inside the ring grew a small town of more than two hundred houses with two chapels and a square in the middle of the arena.

That town was cleared only in the nineteenth century. Expropriations were completed around 1825, and in 1830 the arena held its first spectacle in centuries — a bull event to celebrate the capture of Algiers. Bulls have been part of its life ever since: the Easter feria and the Rice feria bring corridas, and the courses camarguaises, including the Cocarde d'Or, are held here too. Concerts and plays fill the summer. Since 1981 the amphitheatre has been part of the "Arles, Roman and Romanesque Monuments" World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The amphitheatre is in the historic centre of Arles, a short walk from the Roman theatre. Nîmes–Alès–Camargue–Cévennes Airport (FNI), about 19 km away, is the nearest.

Arles Amphitheatre

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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