Tour de la Lanterne

The tallest of the three medieval towers that guard the Old Port of La Rochelle, the Tour de la Lanterne is both an old harbour lighthouse and a former prison whose walls are covered in the carvings of its inmates. A massive round stone drum about 25 metres high is crowned by a slender octagonal Gothic spire, its ribs studded with crockets and its faces pierced by trefoil windows in the Flamboyant manner, bringing the whole structure to around 55 metres. A small stone lantern near the top once held the fire that guided ships in from the bay, and the spire itself served sailors as a daymark visible from far out at sea. Rabelais knew it: in the fifth book of his Pantagruel tales the giant sails into port by the light of the lantern of La Rochelle.

An older tower stood here in the early 13th century, closing the entrance of the town's first harbour. The present building was begun in 1445, wrapping around the earlier core, and took more than twenty years to finish; it was completed in 1468 thanks to money from Jehan Mérichon, five times mayor of La Rochelle and a counsellor to Louis XI. At that time it marked the south-western corner of the medieval ramparts and stood at the water's edge. It survived when Richelieu had the town walls razed after the great siege of 1627–28 and was later absorbed into the new fortifications of the 1680s. A thorough restoration between 1900 and 1914, led first by Juste Lisch and then Albert Ballu, gave it back its medieval look.

The tower's many names record a darker side. During the Wars of Religion, in 1568, Protestant La Rochelle locked up a group of Catholic priests inside it, and they were later killed, so it became the Priests' Tower; much later, in 1822, two of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle, young soldiers condemned for a liberal plot, were held here before their execution in Paris. From the 17th to the 19th century it served as a jail for sailors and prisoners of war from England, Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, who left more than six hundred graffiti cut into its walls, among them finely detailed ships. Contemporary art was added in 1985: a concrete floor by Jean-Pierre Pincemin and works by Gottfried Honegger in the upper rooms. La Rochelle itself, a lively harbour city on the Bay of Biscay, was for centuries a great Protestant stronghold and a port of the Atlantic trade.

Getting there

The tower stands at the edge of the Old Port in the centre of La Rochelle, less than a kilometre from the heart of the city. La Rochelle station, a short walk away, has direct high-speed trains from Paris. The nearest airport is La Rochelle – Île de Ré Airport (LRH), about 4 km from the tower.