La Vieille Charité
Rose arcades around a domed chapel, with museums inside.
Zairon — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Benh LIEU SONG — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Mike is Michi — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rémih — CC BY-SA 4.0
**An hour and a half to two hours** is enough to walk it slowly and have a coffee in one of its squares, plus an hour if you go into the Vieille Charité museums. The quarter is tiny — ten minutes end to end — but the point is not to cross it, it is to get lost in it; take a staircase without knowing where it leads and you'll end up in a square you weren't looking for. Many people combine Le Panier with the Old Port and MuCEM in one day, which makes sense as they adjoin on foot.
It suits families with children who walk, and not anyone with a **pushchair**: the quarter is built on a hill, the steps are beyond counting and the paving is old and uneven. Older children usually enjoy it — the murals, the soap shops and the sweet shops turn it into a treasure hunt. There is almost no car traffic in most of the lanes, which is a real advantage. Plan stops: the squares offer little shade in summer.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
On the small hill north of the Old Port sits **Le Panier**, Marseille's oldest quarter and the site of the first Greek settlement. Its name — "the basket" — comes from an old inn that stood here, and the quarter itself is a web of narrow lanes, staircases, arches and washing strung between windows, closer to an Italian village than to a major French city. It carries a wound in its history: in January 1943 the German occupation emptied the quarter of its residents and dynamited the whole section next to the port. What survived is what you walk through today — which is why the frontages along its southern edge turn abruptly modern while the lanes above them stay centuries old. For decades the quarter was poor and neglected, home to Italian immigrants and later Corsicans and North Africans; over the last twenty years it has filled with artisan workshops, hand-cut soap, small cafés and street murals. At its heart stands **La Vieille Charité**, the old almshouse with its rose-coloured arcades and domed chapel, now a museum. Walking it without a map is the right method: every turn opens onto a small square or another flight of steps.
Rose arcades around a domed chapel, with museums inside.
Hanging washing, murals and small squares — no map needed.
Hand-cut Marseille soap, pottery and print.
Le Panier, 13002 Marseille