Destinations · France · Marseille
Le Panier and the Vieille Charité
The oldest ground in the city, climbing to a rose-stone courtyard most visitors never enter.
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Le Panier is where Marseille began, and the lane plan still follows the Greek one. Today it is pastel façades, street art, soap workshops and small squares with a café in the corner — a quarter to get lost in rather than to tick off.
At the top stands the Vieille Charité, Pierre Puget’s seventeenth-century almshouse: three storeys of rose-stone arcading around a courtyard, with an oval-domed chapel at the centre. Opening arrangements for the courtyard and its museums are institutional and change; check them on the day.