La Ciotat

A charming small town, La Ciotat is set in a bay that backs onto the Bec de l'Aigle and the Cap Canaille. With a number of beaches and calanques typical of the area, La Ciotat looks out over the Mediterranean, its remarkable bay home to a wide range of marine life. A breathtaking site of exceptional natural beauty, thhe town boasts a a world-famous gulf, the highest seaside cliffs in Europe, vast sandy beaches, the Mugel and Figuerolles calanques and the the Île de Ver. Archaeologists have found artefacts and bones which show that human beings were populating the area here as far back as the late Neolithic era (3000 – 2000 BC).

What to see and visit: the ruins of the Fort Saint-Pierre (on the Île Verte); the ancient Chapelle des Pénitents Bleus (1598); the Chapelle des Pénitents Noirs (1630); the seventeenth-century Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs; the hillside Chapelle de Notre-Dame de la Garde; the seventeenth-century Église Notre-Dame de l'Assomption; the Musée Ciotaden (a local archaeological and ethnography museum); the Eden Theatre (built in 1889) – the oldest cinema in the world, it showed the first public screenings of the first films made by Louis and Auguste Lumière.
Recommended activities: sea trips, water skiing, surfing, windsurfing, scuba diving and underwater fishing, sailing, walking routes, rock climbing.

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