The Port of Marseille, officially the Grand Port Maritime de Marseille or Marseille-Fos Port, is France’s largest seaport, on the Mediterranean coast of Provence, at the eastern end of the Gulf of Lion near the Rhône delta. It moved 79 million tonnes of goods in 2019, making it the biggest port in France, the third-biggest in the Mediterranean, the seventh in Europe and about 41st in the world, and it is also one of the world’s ten busiest cruise ports. It works on two sites: the docks of northern Marseille from La Joliette to L’Estaque, and the industrial port at Fos-sur-Mer about 50 kilometres to the north-west. Its origin is older than France itself: Greek settlers from Phocaea founded Massalia around 600 BC in a rocky cove that is now the Old Port. Almost everything about the port since then has been decided by the shape of the coast, the hills behind it and the river to the west.
The Lacydon: A Rocky Cove Chosen by Phocaean Greeks in 600 BC
The Greeks who arrived from Phocaea, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, were looking for a sheltered landing on a coast that offers few of them. East of the Rhône, the limestone hills of Provence reach the sea in cliffs and narrow inlets, the calanques, that run on towards Cassis. West of the river, the shore of the Gulf of Lion is a wide coastal plain of lagoons and salt marsh. On the rocky stretch east of the river, the Greeks found the Lacydon, a narrow rocky cove running inland from the sea with hills on either side. They set up a trading post on the hills of its northern shore.
The site had three advantages. It offered enclosed water on a coast exposed to the mistral, the cold north-westerly that sweeps down the Rhône valley and can blow for days at an average of 50 kilometres an hour. It was close to the mouth of the Rhône, the river route into Gaul, yet east of its marshy delta, the Camargue. And the Frioul archipelago, four islands including If, stands out in the bay in front of it. Massalia grew into a major Greek trading city, founded its own colonies along the coast from Agathe (Agde) to Nikaia (Nice) in the fourth and third centuries BC, and sent explorers such as Pytheas, who sailed into the Atlantic between 330 and 320 BC.
The cove shaped the city around it. The Abbey of Saint-Victor rose on the hills south of the water between the third and ninth centuries, on the site of a Greek burial ground. Rope for the ships was made from hemp grown on land at the head of the port, and that gave the city’s main street its name, the Canebière, from the Provençal word for hemp. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries quays were built under Louis XII and Louis XIII, and after the city rebelled against its governor, Louis XIV ordered Fort Saint-Jean and Fort Saint-Nicolas built on either side of the narrow entrance, and he established an arsenal and a fleet inside the harbour. The galley arsenal stood on the southern side of the port, where convicts sentenced to row in the war fleet were branded with the letters GAL.
Why the Old Port’s 6-Metre Depth Pushed Ships North to La Joliette
The Lacydon served for more than two thousand years, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was full. In 1854 it had room for between 1,000 and 1,200 ships, and about 18,000 merchant ships passed through each year, carrying roughly a quarter of the trade handled at Liverpool. The limits were physical. The inlet was hemmed in by the city on all sides, and its water was only about 6 metres deep, which proved too shallow for the steamships of the later nineteenth century.
The answer lay along the open coast to the north-west, where the shore runs straight rather than cutting inland. On 5 August 1844 the national government passed a law to build a new basin at La Joliette, north of the Old Port, at a cost of 13 million francs. The centrepiece was a large mole, a breakwater built with concrete-block techniques, enclosing sheltered water off the open shore. The basin came into use in 1847 and was finished in 1853.
That design could be repeated, and it was. New moles, quays and docks were added further north-west, until the harbour installations formed a continuous strip up the coast to L’Estaque. This is the eastern half of today’s Grand Port Maritime, and it still handles ferries, cruise ships and part of the cargo. Under the French Empire, Marseille’s economy was dominated by its role as the port linking the North African colonies of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia with mainland France.
The Old Port itself became something else. From 1905 the Marseille transporter bridge, designed by Ferdinand Arnodin, crossed the Old Port. In January 1943 German forces, aided by French police, dynamited much of the historic old town, and on 22 August 1944 they blew up the transporter bridge to block the harbour. Fernand Pouillon was put in charge of rebuilding in 1948. Today the Old Port is a marina and a local fish market, largely pedestrianised since 2013, when Marseille was European Capital of Culture.
The Chaîne de l’Estaque and the 7,120-Metre Rove Tunnel
At L’Estaque the northward growth hit a wall. The Chaîne de l’Estaque, a limestone ridge up to 278 metres high, runs down to the sea and separates Marseille from the Étang de Berre and the Rhône beyond. The port’s backers wanted a water route to the river that would let barges avoid the open Mediterranean altogether.
Their solution was to go through the hill. The engineer Guérard drew up a plan for the Marseille Chamber of Commerce in 1879, and an act of 24 December 1903 authorised it. The Rove Tunnel was cut at sea level through the Estaque ridge, 7,120 metres long, 22 metres wide and 11.4 metres high, with 4 metres of water. The width was increased from a planned 18 metres so that barges could pass each other. Work underground began in 1910 with compressed-air hammers, and although unexpected water inflows slowed progress, the central rock plug was blown on 19 February 1916. The whole Canal de Marseille au Rhône, 81 kilometres from Marseille to Arles, opened to traffic on 25 April 1927.
It remains the longest canal tunnel in the world, but it no longer works. In 1963 a section of the roof collapsed and the tunnel was closed, cutting the canal between Marignane and Marseille. By then, though, the port’s growth was already happening on the other side of the hills.
Fos-sur-Mer, the Étang de Berre and the Flat Land West of the Hills
Beyond the Estaque ridge the geography changes completely. The Étang de Berre is a brackish lagoon of 155.3 square kilometres, formed when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age, and linked to the Mediterranean by the Canal de Caronte to Port-de-Bouc. Around it, and westward to the Rhône delta, lies low, flat land with space that the rocky Marseille shore could never offer. Marseille Provence Airport sits at Marignane on its south-eastern shore, with its main runway extending into the lagoon on reclaimed land.
The Gulf of Fos, on the open coast between the lagoon and the Grand Rhône, gave the port what the Marseille shore lacked: flat land beside the water and a direct link to the river. The Rhône is navigable for large barges for the 325 kilometres from the mouth of the Saône at Lyon to the sea at Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, next door to Fos, and it carries an average of about 1,700 cubic metres of water per second past Beaucaire. So the modern industrial port was built at Fos-sur-Mer, about 50 kilometres from Marseille, with container terminals, liquefied natural gas terminals, oil berths and heavy industry on the waterfront, including the ArcelorMittal steelworks.
That split explains the port’s cargo. Most of its tonnage is energy: Wikipedia’s Marseille article puts petroleum at about 60% of the freight passing through, and it arrives mainly at Fos and around the Étang de Berre rather than in the city. Traffic was 88 million tonnes in 2011 and 79 million tonnes in 2019. The port is also an arrival point for about 2.4 million people a year, 890,100 of them on cruise ships, and its ferry and cruise quays are in the Marseille basins beside the city. The port supports about 41,500 jobs, according to an OECD study.
The industrial zone at Fos has a cost. With steel, chemicals and oil side by side, pollution levels there are high, and the town of Fos-sur-Mer, which still has 6 kilometres of sandy beach, lives with it. That tension between industry and a coast people also want to live and swim beside is the latest version of a choice Marseille has faced since the Lacydon filled up.
To follow the river that made Fos possible, see our guide to the Rhône, and for the sea that Marseille has traded across for 2,600 years, read our overview of the Mediterranean Sea; the wider setting of Provence and the Gulf of Lion is covered in our geography of France.