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Roots Earth in Marseille: audio stories about 58 places

Roots Earth has audio stories about 58 places in Marseille, France, in Europe. The Marseille stories are in English and German only: Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch and Albanian are in 126 of the 130 Roots Earth cities, and Marseille is not one of them. The app needs no account: open Marseille, pick a place on the city's map of places and play. Download a city's audio, then it plays without a connection. The stories are written by local people.

The 58 places are listed below in the order the app shows them, and again further down with their coordinates. The lists were taken from the Roots Earth catalogue on 15 September 2026.

Published 16 September 2026. Markdown: marseille.md

The 58 places in Marseille with audio stories

In the order the app shows them.

  1. Garden of the Remains (Ancient Port)
  2. Marseille History Museum
  3. Roman Docks Museum
  4. The Vieux-Port Shade Canopy and the Quayside Fish Market
  5. Marseille City Hall
  6. Hôtel de Cabre
  7. Diamond House
  8. The Rebuilt North Quay
  9. Deportations Memorial
  10. Fort Saint-Jean
  11. Fort Saint-Nicolas and the Citadel
  12. Mucem, Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations
  13. Villa Méditerranée and the Cosquer Cave Reconstruction
  14. Regards de Provence Museum, the former Maritime Sanitary Station
  15. Church of Saint-Laurent
  16. Place de Lenche
  17. The Accoules Bell Tower and Steps
  18. La Vieille Charité
  19. Sainte-Marie-Majeure Cathedral, the New Major
  20. The Old Major
  21. The Joliette Docks
  22. Rue de la République
  23. La Canebière
  24. Palais de la Bourse
  25. Memorial of La Marseillaise
  26. Capucins Market, Noailles
  27. Rue d'Aubagne
  28. Alcazar Library
  29. Porte d'Aix
  30. Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, known as Les Réformés
  31. Saint-Charles Station Grand Staircase
  32. Marseille Opera House
  33. The Hôtel-Dieu
  34. Palais Longchamp
  35. La Friche la Belle de Mai
  36. Cours Julien
  37. Place Jean-Jaurès, La Plaine
  38. Saint-Victor Abbey
  39. Palais du Pharo and its Park
  40. Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde
  41. The Corniche
  42. Vallon des Auffes
  43. Memorial to the Dead of the Army of the Orient
  44. Great Synagogue of Marseille
  45. Château Borély and Borély Park
  46. Parc Chanot, Site of the Colonial Exhibitions
  47. Stade Vélodrome
  48. Cité Radieuse, Unité d'Habitation
  49. L'Estaque
  50. Les Goudes and Callelongue
  51. Château d'If
  52. Frioul Islands and the Caroline Hospital
  53. The 1720 Plague and the Observance Mass Grave
  54. Saint-Pierre Cemetery
  55. Church of Saint-Ferreol les Augustins
  56. La Criee, the Former Fish Auction Hall
  57. CMA CGM Tower and the Working Port
  58. Camp Oddo, Armenian Refugee Camp

Is there an audio guide for Garden of the Remains (Ancient Port)?

Yes. Garden of the Remains (Ancient Port) has its audio stories in the Roots Earth app: a short introduction and a deeper story, in English and German.

It is place 1 of the 58 Marseille places in the app, at 43.296346, 5.369889. Every one of the other 57 places in the list above has the same two stories.

Roots Earth is not a guided tour: you choose the place on the city's map of places and play its story yourself.

How to use Roots Earth in Marseille

Open Roots Earth and choose Marseille. The city has its own map of places with all 58 of them on it. Tap the place you are standing in front of, or any other, and play its short introduction or its deeper story. You decide what to listen to and in which order.

You can listen in English and German, and there is no account. Download a city's audio, then it plays without a connection.

In full

All 58 places in Marseille, in the app's order, with their coordinates.

All 58 places in Marseille, with coordinates

Every place below has a short introduction and a deeper story in the Roots Earth app, in English and German. The names, the coordinates (latitude, longitude) and the one line descriptions are the app's own catalogue values of 15 September 2026; a place without a line here has none that this page can print.

1. Garden of the Remains (Ancient Port)

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
An archaeological garden reveals the buried edge of ancient Massalia: Greek defences, a Roman quay, roads, graves and waterworks. Its low stones preserve the working threshold between city and harbour.

2. Marseille History Museum

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Created after major urban excavations, the Marseille History Museum follows the port city across more than two and a half millennia. Ancient hulls, objects and media connect its galleries directly to the archaeological harbour outside.

3. Roman Docks Museum

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Set into a post-war apartment block, the Roman Docks Museum preserves part of a harbour warehouse, including huge storage jars still fixed in the floor. Its understated exterior conceals a rare surviving commercial site.

4. The Vieux-Port Shade Canopy and the Quayside Fish Market

Coordinates
43.294, 5.37
In one line
A polished steel canopy turns the life of the Vieux-Port into an upside-down public spectacle. Beneath and around it, small-scale fish selling keeps the harbour’s working traditions beside its redesigned civic quays.

5. Marseille City Hall

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Marseille’s Baroque City Hall faces the harbour in pale stone, projecting municipal authority toward the water. Its divided historic floors, copied doorway arms and survival through repeated threats make the façade a compact record of civic power.

6. Hôtel de Cabre

Coordinates
43.29611, 5.37
In one line
This private late-Gothic and Renaissance house is read from the street through mullioned windows, carved portraits and damaged heraldry. Rotated during post-war redevelopment, it carries its former orientation in a street name carved into stone.

7. Diamond House

Coordinates
43.29655, 5.3692
In one line
Diamond-point stones animate this rare survivor of old Marseille, once a merchant mansion and later a crowded home. Its carved façade and grand staircase preserve layers of civic, commercial and domestic life.

8. The Rebuilt North Quay

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This long stone frontage rebuilt the Old Port’s north bank between 1947 and 1960. Fernand Pouillon’s shaded galleries, deep loggias and measured roofline create a modern counterpart to the surviving Panier above.

9. Deportations Memorial

Coordinates
43.29557, 5.36245
In one line
Set inside a German wartime bunker, this memorial restores names and lives to Marseille’s deportees. It also confronts the 1943 roundups, forced evacuation and destruction of the Old Port’s north bank.

10. Fort Saint-Jean

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Medieval towers, royal ramparts and wartime scars meet at this harbour-mouth fortress. Restored as part of Mucem, its bridges and migration garden have turned a sealed military site into a civic route.

11. Fort Saint-Nicolas and the Citadel

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Raised by Louis the Fourteenth to control rebellious Marseille, this double fortress later became a prison and wartime stronghold.

12. Mucem, Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations

Coordinates
43.2967, 5.36
In one line
Wrapped in a dark concrete lattice, Mucem joins Mediterranean collections to Marseille’s harbour landscape. Rudy Ricciotti and Roland Carta’s cube connects by footbridge to historic Fort Saint-Jean.

13. Villa Méditerranée and the Cosquer Cave Reconstruction

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This waterfront landmark pairs Stefano Boeri’s dramatic cantilevered architecture with an immersive reconstruction of the submerged Cosquer Cave, preserving the story of vulnerable Ice Age art that cannot be visited in its original setting.

14. Regards de Provence Museum, the former Maritime Sanitary Station

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This art museum occupies Marseille’s former Maritime Sanitary Station, where arriving travellers once followed a controlled health-processing route. Preserved counters and disinfection machinery reveal the building’s original purpose beneath its cultural life.

15. Church of Saint-Laurent

Coordinates
43.2958397, 5.363431
In one line
This sturdy medieval parish church overlooks Marseille’s port in pink Cap Couronne stone. Its plain Romanesque-Provençal interior, sailors’ history and survival amid the destruction of 1943 give it exceptional emotional weight.

16. Place de Lenche

Coordinates
43.29655, 5.3692
In one line
This shaded Panier square is traditionally associated with ancient Massalia’s agora, although no Greek remains are visible here and archaeology does not confirm the claim. Its later name recalls a powerful Marseille coral-trading family.

17. The Accoules Bell Tower and Steps

Coordinates
43.29655, 5.3692
In one line
An isolated medieval bell tower rises above one of Le Panier’s characteristic stairways, surviving the church demolished during the Revolution. Its clock and civic alarm once served the port and city beyond parish life.

18. La Vieille Charité

Coordinates
43.300205, 5.367774
In one line
Pierre Puget’s former almshouse encloses a luminous Baroque courtyard around a domed chapel. Once designed to confine Marseille’s poor, La Vieille Charité now houses museums, exhibitions, research and cultural activity.

19. Sainte-Marie-Majeure Cathedral, the New Major

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Marseille’s active cathedral is a striped Romano-Byzantine landmark beside the sea. Its monumental nineteenth-century design has five domes and a richly coloured interior, while the surviving Old Major reveals what its construction displaced.

20. The Old Major

Coordinates
43.300205, 5.367774
In one line
This surviving fragment of Marseille’s medieval cathedral preserves Provençal Romanesque masonry beside its monumental successor. Its cut western end, low tiled roof and rescued choir make the cost of nineteenth-century redevelopment visible.

21. The Joliette Docks

Coordinates
43.29638, 5.36962
In one line
The Joliette Docks are a monumental Second Empire warehouse complex adapted for shops and offices. Their masonry, cast iron and former freight spaces embody Marseille’s industrial port growth and its later shift toward waterfront reuse.

22. Rue de la République

Coordinates
43.29926239, 5.37413726
In one line
Rue de la République is Marseille’s great Second Empire avenue, driven through older neighbourhoods to link the Vieux-Port with La Joliette. Its uniform façades conceal mass displacement, engineered slopes and an unexpected working-port social history.

23. La Canebière

Coordinates
43.2961, 5.3776
In one line
La Canebière is Marseille’s emblematic avenue between the Vieux-Port and the Réformés. Named for hemp and the rope trade, it layers grand hotel façades and maritime commerce with memories of assassination, fire and public resistance.

24. Palais de la Bourse

Coordinates
43.296277, 5.375233
In one line
The Palais de la Bourse is Marseille’s monumental nineteenth-century chamber of commerce. Its Corinthian portico, Greek navigator statues and vast former exchange hall turn the city’s maritime history into an architecture of commercial power.

25. Memorial of La Marseillaise

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This modest address holds a layered Marseille story: an old ball court, a revolutionary club, a theatre and baths. Its memorial explains how a war song acquired the city’s name without being written here.

26. Capucins Market, Noailles

Coordinates
43.296424, 5.379596
In one line
An open-air food market fills Noailles’s narrow streets with produce, fish, herbs and spices. Founded in 1956 on land once occupied by Capuchin friars, it expresses Marseille through commerce, migration and everyday appetite.

27. Rue d'Aubagne

Coordinates
43.294112, 5.3813213
In one line
Rue d’Aubagne remembers eight people killed when two buildings collapsed in 2018. A named public place, a plaque and a planned civic resource centre carry the tragedy into Marseille’s street plan and collective memory.

28. Alcazar Library

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
The Alcazar Library places a luminous contemporary building behind the preserved entrance of a celebrated music hall. Its architecture unites public reading, specialist collections and cultural memory around a soaring interior street.

29. Porte d'Aix

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This neoclassical triumphal arch replaced an old city gate on the former Porte Royale approach. Its changing dedication and battle reliefs reveal how a monument begun for one royal regime was rewritten before completion.

30. Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, known as Les Réformés

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This Roman Catholic church takes its nickname, Les Réformés, from Reformed Augustinian friars, not Protestantism. Its twin-spired neo-Gothic silhouette, vast stained-glass programme and paired organ cases crown the upper Canebière.

31. Saint-Charles Station Grand Staircase

Coordinates
43.30175, 5.38063
In one line
This monumental station approach turns an everyday climb into a sculptural portrait of Marseille. Provence, the ancient Greek city and France’s colonial ambitions all appear along a route whose imagery the city now examines critically.

32. Marseille Opera House

Coordinates
43.296359, 5.369884
In one line
Behind an eighteenth-century colonnade, Marseille’s opera house conceals a richly collaborative Art Deco reconstruction. Its layered fabric records two disasters, a resilient performance tradition and the city’s pioneering operatic history beyond Paris.

33. The Hôtel-Dieu

Coordinates
43.29611, 5.37
In one line
Marseille’s former Hôtel-Dieu embodies centuries of civic medicine behind a commanding stone façade. Now a luxury hotel rather than a public hospital, it preserves monumental stairs, vaulted galleries and archaeological traces within a transformed interior.

34. Palais Longchamp

Coordinates
43.30240631, 5.39047289
In one line
Palais Longchamp celebrates the canal that brought Durance water to Marseille. Henry Espérandieu joined a monumental fountain, working water infrastructure and two museums into one sweeping ensemble, with the remains of a former zoo behind it.

35. La Friche la Belle de Mai

Coordinates
43.29638889, 5.37
In one line
This vast former tobacco factory has grown into a layered cultural district of stages, exhibitions, skating, childcare and shared space. Its exposed industrial frame meets bold contemporary additions, preserving the scale of work while changing what work means here.

36. Cours Julien

Coordinates
43.29352778, 5.38330556
In one line
Cours Julien is a sloping public district where a former wholesale produce market has become a centre of street art and cultural life. Its painted stairs, changing murals, fountain and everyday gathering spaces make impermanence part of its identity.

37. Place Jean-Jaurès, La Plaine

Coordinates
43.2975, 5.380556
In one line
La Plaine is a large civic square where market life, play and protest meet. Its recent pedestrian redesign overlays a history of military assembly, underground transport and a daring departure for Corsica by airship.

38. Saint-Victor Abbey

Coordinates
43.2904749, 5.3655446
In one line
Saint-Victor Abbey is a fortified medieval landmark built over an early Christian basilica and ancient quarry. Its crypts preserve layered architecture, carved sarcophagi and objects tied to Marseille’s religious history.

39. Palais du Pharo and its Park

Coordinates
43.29417, 5.3583
In one line
The Palais du Pharo is an imperial residence that became a public, medical and civic institution without ever housing its intended occupants. Its headland park pairs harbour views with monumental contemporary sculpture.

40. Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde

Coordinates
43.30028, 5.36472
In one line
Notre-Dame de la Garde is Marseille’s hilltop pilgrimage basilica, lookout and former royal fort.

41. The Corniche

Coordinates
43.28538, 5.350932
In one line
The Corniche is Marseille’s coastal road and promenade, engineered across coves and later widened into a seafront balcony. Its bridges, villas, vast concrete bench and tide gauge combine leisure with infrastructure.

42. Vallon des Auffes

Coordinates
43.28509903, 5.35362339
In one line
Vallon des Auffes is a tiny working fishing harbour sheltered beneath the Corniche viaduct. Rope-making, Italian migration, traditional boats and layered coastal engineering give depth to its celebrated rocky setting.

43. Memorial to the Dead of the Army of the Orient

Coordinates
43.28538, 5.350932
In one line
This seafront granite arch honours French servicemen who died far from home during the First World War. Conceived as a symbolic eastern gateway, it sets Antoine Sartorio’s bronze Victory against the open Mediterranean.

44. Great Synagogue of Marseille

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Marseille’s oldest surviving building purpose-built for Jewish worship remains an active synagogue. Its Romano-Byzantine façade and rose window place it within Marseille’s nineteenth-century architectural landscape, while the crowning Tablets of the Law express its Jewish religious identity.

45. Château Borély and Borély Park

Coordinates
43.260394, 5.382249
In one line
An eighteenth-century merchant’s country house anchors a park shaped by successive generations of landscape designers. The château now presents decorative arts, earthenware and fashion amid gilded rooms and painted illusions, while service corridors and concealed stairs remain behind the formal rooms.

46. Parc Chanot, Site of the Colonial Exhibitions

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Now a large exhibition complex, Parc Chanot hosted major colonial exhibitions in 1906 and 1922. Its ceremonial gate and Palais des Arts survive as fragments of spectacles that promoted French imperial rule to mass audiences.

47. Stade Vélodrome

Coordinates
43.269806, 5.395922
In one line
Home to Olympique de Marseille, the Stade Vélodrome carries the memory of a working cycle track beneath its modern football identity. Its vast white roof gathers steep blue stands into one of the city’s great public interiors.

48. Cité Radieuse, Unité d'Habitation

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
Le Corbusier’s first Unité d’Habitation is both an architectural landmark and an inhabited apartment block. Raised on concrete pilotis, it combines interlocking homes, interior streets, communal services and a sculptural roof into a vertical city.

49. L'Estaque

Coordinates
43.363472, 5.32146
In one line
Once a fishing village and industrial settlement, L’Estaque became a testing ground for painters drawn to its red roofs, blue gulf, viaducts and chimneys. The name “cubism” emerged from Georges Braque’s landscapes of this shore.

50. Les Goudes and Callelongue

Coordinates
43.216076, 5.345771
In one line
At Marseille’s southern edge, Les Goudes and Callelongue pair working coves, cabanons and pale limestone with the remains of industry and coastal surveillance. Their modest houses tell stories of fishers, factory workers and weekend life.

51. Château d'If

Coordinates
43.279722, 5.325278
In one line
Built as a royal fortress guarding and monitoring Marseille, Château d’If became a prison and then a literary landmark. Its real captives share the island with the fictional cells of Edmond Dantès and Abbé Faria.

52. Frioul Islands and the Caroline Hospital

Coordinates
43.2908322, 5.4027828
In one line
The Frioul Islands hold Marseille’s great offshore quarantine complex, centred on the ruined Hôpital Caroline. Its wind-swept pavilions reveal an ambitious medical design reduced by cost, overtaken by changing diseases and shattered by war.

53. The 1720 Plague and the Observance Mass Grave

Coordinates
43.301618, 5.3682291
In one line
An unmarked residential corner covers the Observance plague grave, used during Marseille’s renewed epidemic in 1722. Archaeology here connected the city’s devastating outbreak with modern study of burial practice, health and disease.

54. Saint-Pierre Cemetery

Coordinates
43.291477, 5.40487
In one line
Marseille’s largest cemetery is a vast, wooded city of avenues, mausoleums and sculpture. Saint-Pierre holds major artistic monuments alongside family graves, military memorials, civic monuments and generations of residents.

55. Church of Saint-Ferreol les Augustins

Coordinates
43.296167, 5.374278
In one line
This Gothic church binds the Vieux-Port to centuries of religious and working life. Its shortened nave, later façade and gathered artworks make the building a compact record of Marseille’s upheavals and survivals.

56. La Criee, the Former Fish Auction Hall

Coordinates
43.296346, 5.369889
In one line
This former fish auction hall now fronts Marseille’s national theatre. Its unmistakable 1909 inscription preserves the memory of maritime trade, while a modern building behind the reconstructed façade serves performance and public culture.

57. CMA CGM Tower and the Working Port

Coordinates
43.31489, 5.366
In one line
Zaha Hadid’s glass headquarters rises between motorway viaducts beside Marseille’s commercial harbour. It makes Marseille’s port economy visible in the city, while the port’s working docks are primarily at Fos-sur-Mer, west of Marseille.

58. Camp Oddo, Armenian Refugee Camp

Coordinates
43.326157, 5.375046
In one line
No barracks survive from Camp Oddo, where Armenian genocide survivors lived between 1922 and 1927. A plaque, memorial garden and local street names now carry the history of a temporary refuge that became a community.

Roots Earth in short

Roots Earth has audio stories about 5,665 places in 130 cities, 25 countries and 6 regions, written by local people.

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  • Download a city's audio, then it plays without a connection
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