Marseille: The Bonne Mère, the MuCEM and the Château d'If

Required Activities

• Climb to Notre-Dame de la Garde and find three things inside and out: the model ships and aircraft hung from the vaults as ex-votos by sailors who came home, the bullet damage still traceable in the mosaics from the fighting at the Liberation, and, from the terrace, the 11.2 m gilded Virgin and Child standing on a 41 m bell tower above you

• Walk up the MuCEM's outside ramps between the concrete lace and the glass, counting the cast piers that hold the whole thing up — 309 of them, in the same ultra-high-performance concrete as the footbridge — then cross the 130 m bridge to the Fort Saint-Jean

• Walk Le Panier, the surviving upper part of Marseille's old quarters after 1,500 buildings below it were dynamited in February 1943, and find the Hôtel de Cabre of 1535 — the oldest house in the city, the one building left standing, later swung round on jacks to line up with the new street — then the place de Lenche, laid out on the Greek agora

• Take the boat out to the Château d'If — 28 m square, three floors, three casemated corner towers, built from 1529 after François I came out to the islet to see a rhinoceros and realised the coast was undefended — and find the cell Dumas gave Edmond Dantès in a fortress that served as a prison for four hundred years

• Walk down to the Vallon des Auffes, named for the alfa grass its ropemakers wove into ships' cordage and fishing nets from about 1750, and look up at the three 17 m arches of the 60 m bridge from the quay below, then back at the 5 m bronze Victory of the Armée d'Orient memorial at the entrance