Paintings on water
Giant works mirrored in the black submarine docks.
P. Charpiat — CC BY-SA 2.5 · Symac — CC BY-SA 3.0 · U.S. Army Air Forces Spot Number F3683, Sortie 106G-682, Exposure LSV-3062 (taken by an aircraft of No. 544 Squadron RAF) — Public domain · jpm1 — CC BY-SA 3.0
The German occupation built it 1941–43 to shelter Atlantic U-boats: concrete metres thick that Allied bombs could not crack, and after the war a mass too costly to demolish. It sat derelict for decades until Bordeaux found this inspired use in 2020.
Among the most successful places with them: darkness, moving colour, music and water — pure magic at their ages. Just hold very small hands on the over-water gangways; railings exist but excitement is stronger.
Any time — it is permanently dark inside — and the perfect heat or rain refuge. Pair it with the nearby Cité du Vin and Bacalan food halls for a full Bacalan day on one tram line.
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The world's largest digital art centre lives in the strangest possible place: a giant concrete U-boat base built by the Germans in the Second World War, with its four water docks and impenetrable roof. A building made for war has become a cathedral of light. The shows are great painters' works — Van Gogh, Klimt, Dalí in successive seasons — projected enormous on the concrete walls and mirrored in the black dock water, with music filling the space. You walk gangways over the water while the paintings move around and beneath you — an immersion unlike any museum. It is Bordeaux's most successful marriage of heavy history and contemporary art, works for every age and any weather — book ahead, the slots fill.
Giant works mirrored in the black submarine docks.
Metres-thick war concrete turned the biggest digital art hall.
A side hall of contemporary digital artists on the same ticket.
Bassin n°1, Rue Achard, 33300 Bordeaux