Palais Longchamp — water tower
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0

Palais Longchamp

  • 2 min read
  • 43.304° N 5.394° E

Interesting facts

  • A young Auguste Rodin briefly carved cornices on the palace around 1865 and was reportedly dismissed as too slow; in 1898 he gave the museum a plaster sculpture.
  • The four bulls hauling the Durance in Jules Cavelier's fountain group are Camargue bulls, and the whole group, carved in Calissanne stone, stands about 10 metres high.
  • The caryatids in the grotto under the arch have their eyes closed, a symbol of water running unseen through the earth before it bursts into the light.
  • The names of the rivers feeding the Durance are engraved on the triumphal arch, so the monument doubles as a map of where Marseille's water comes from.
  • A dedication honours two regimes at once: Louis-Philippe, under whom the canal was built, and Napoleon III, under whom the palace was finally finished.
  • The law of 1838 that launched the Canal de Marseille allowed the city to draw up to 5.75 cubic metres of water per second from the Durance.
  • The cholera that spurred the project was brutal: about 865 deaths in late 1834 were followed by more than 2,500 in July 1835 alone.
  • Long before Espérandieu took over, the city had already commissioned a first design from the architect Pascal Coste in 1847.
  • Actual construction only got under way in 1862, more than two decades after the ceremonial first stone was laid in 1839.
  • In 2013 the empty cages of the old zoo were repopulated with fibreglass animal sculptures, each decorated by a different artist.

Why it is worth it

The Palais Longchamp is Marseille's monument to drinking water. In the 1830s the city was short of water and suffered two deadly cholera epidemics, and it answered by building the Canal de Marseille, some 85 kilometres long, to bring water from the Durance. On 15 November 1839 the Duke of Orléans laid a first stone for a monument to mark its arrival, remarking that laying the first stone was easy and the last would be the hard one. He was right: it took three decades of competing designs and arguments over cost before the palace was opened on 15 August 1869.

Along the way the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi drew up several schemes, which the city rejected; it then hired Henri Espérandieu, the young architect of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde. Bartholdi went on suing the city for decades, claiming the semicircular colonnade was his idea, and never won. Espérandieu's building is a showpiece of Second Empire classicism: a central water tower set on the Longchamp plateau, joined by curving colonnades to two wings. The eastern wing holds the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the western one the natural history museum.

The water tower is the real spectacle. At its top, a sculpture group by Jules Cavelier shows the Durance as a woman flanked by figures of the vine and wheat, with four great bulls. Water pours out beneath them into a basin, over a cascade into a pond and down through a stepped fall past bronze fountains to a second, larger pool. Behind the figures is an artificial grotto carved with stalactites and nymphs. At the entrance gates, four sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye show big cats bringing down their prey.

Behind the palace lies the Parc Longchamp, opened in the same year, with a formal French garden, an English-style landscape garden with a plane tree some 150 years old, and the city observatory. From 1898 to 1987 part of it was a zoo, and its fanciful pavilions for giraffes and elephants and its rockwork bear pits still stand.

Getting there

The palace is in the 4th arrondissement of Marseille, at the end of the Boulevard Longchamp, about 0.6 km from the district's centre. Metro line 1 stops at Cinq Avenues - Longchamp, and tram line T2 has stops at Cinq Avenues and Longchamp. The nearest airport is Marseille Provence Airport (MRS), 20.9 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Bouches-du-Rhône 8The Most Beautiful Places in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur 23The Most Beautiful Places in France 179The Most Remarkable Water Towers 3The Greatest Engineering Wonders in France 23The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Palais Longchamp is a monument in the 4th arrondissement of Marseille, France. It houses both the Musée des beaux-arts and the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Marseille. The surrounding Longchamp Park is listed by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Notable Gardens of France.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

43.30430, 5.39450per Wikidata