The Corniche and the Vallon des Auffes

Plage des Catalans

The city's closest beach, set below the Pharo gardens where Catalan fishermen gave the cove its name.

You're standing on the Plage des Catalans, the nearest beach to the centre of Marseille, just below the Pharo gardens. The name is not a tourist invention. After the plague of 1720 emptied this part of the coast, Catalan fishermen moved into the small cove of Saint-Lambert and built a working village here. By 1790 their community counted around 75 boats and 400 fishermen, and their nightly longline fishing put fresh fish on the city's market tables.

Alexandre Dumas knew the place well enough to set the opening of The Count of Monte-Cristo here: Mercédès, Edmond Dantès's fiancée, comes from the Catalan village. The 16th-century square watchtower still standing on the beach is a leftover from the old quarantine station that once guarded this shore. In the 1850s the cove was turned into a fashionable bathing beach, and the last Catalan families moved west along the coast to a smaller cove you reach later today: the Vallon des Auffes. The water in front of you faces the Château d'If and the Frioul islands.

When you're ready, leave the beach at its southern end and join the Corniche, the sea road, with the water on your left.

Monument aux morts de l'Armée d'Orient et des terres lointaines

A granite arch and a bronze Victory raised in 1927 for the soldiers who died far from France.

You're standing before the Monument aux morts de l'Armée d'Orient et des terres lointaines, the war memorial Marseille raised for the soldiers of the East and of distant lands. The bronze Victory at its centre has her arms flung toward the sky, and she stands inside a granite arch that the Marseille architect Gaston Castel designed as an open portico, a gateway turned to the sea. Marseille was the door to the Orient, and the men remembered here died far from French soil, at the Dardanelles and across the Balkan fronts in the First World War. The sculptor was Antoine Sartorio, the granite came by boat from Corsica, and the memorial was inaugurated on 24 April 1927 by the president of the republic, Gaston Doumergue.

The names and dates of the great campaigns are cut into the flanks of the arch. Look through the arch and you see the Mediterranean and the Frioul islands, the same sea those soldiers crossed. Benches sit at the foot of the monument, and a few steps away the Corniche runs above a small cove. That cove is where the walk goes next.