Arles

Why go

Arles layers two thousand years into a town you can cross on foot in twenty minutes: a Roman arena and theatre, a Romanesque portal among the finest in Europe, the cafés and gardens Van Gogh painted, and now a bold contemporary art campus. It has the slow, sun-baked rhythm of Provence, a summer photography festival of world rank, and beyond the river the wild flatlands of the Camargue. Paris has more of everything; Arles has it all closer together.

History

Arles grew where the Rhône splits into its delta, the last place a road could cross before the sea. Greek traders from Marseille knew it, but its fortune came from Rome: having backed Julius Caesar in his war against Marseille, Arles was rewarded in the 40s BC with a colony of veterans and much of its rival’s trade.

Over the next century and a half the Romans gave it a theatre under Augustus, a forum with underground galleries, and, at the end of the first century AD, an amphitheatre for some twenty thousand spectators. In the fourth century the emperor Constantine lived here at times, built baths by the river, and his son Constantine II was born in the city. Arles was one of the capitals of the late Roman West, and its Alyscamps necropolis was famous across Christendom.

In the Middle Ages the arena was turned into a fortified village, with houses and chapels inside its arches and towers on top, and the cathedral of Saint-Trophime received a carved portal and cloister that rank among the masterpieces of Provençal Romanesque. Clearing the houses from the arena in the nineteenth century revealed the Roman monument again; UNESCO inscribed the Roman and Romanesque monuments in 1981.

On 21 February 1888 Vincent van Gogh stepped off the train into snow. Over the next fifteen months he produced more than three hundred paintings and drawings here, the sunflowers, the night café, the starry Rhône, before the crisis of December 1888, during Paul Gauguin’s visit, and his departure for the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889. Since 1970 Arles has hosted the Rencontres de la photographie each summer, and in 2021 Frank Gehry’s shimmering tower opened at the LUMA arts campus.

UNESCO World Heritage: Arles, Roman and Romanesque Monuments (1981)