Provence has long been popular with British travellers and holidaymakers. The Gallo-Roman city of Arles is not only a wonderful place to visit in its own right, but also makes an idea base to explore the western part of the region and the Rhône valley. It is also the gateway to the unique marshlands of the Camargue delta, land of the Gypsies and meeting place of the Camargue cowboys.

Arles was the the key city of the region in Roman times, and its impressive Roman monuments have UNESCO World Heritage status. The major Roman sites, such as the extraordinarily well-preserved Roman arena, Les Arènes, the baths of Constantine and the Théâtre Antique, are unique in that they are integrated into the houses and buildings of the town. Along with its Roman monuments, Arles has also preserved many lovely buildings dating from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. 

Perhaps Arles' main claim to fame outside of France is that for a time it inspired the great impressionist painter Van Gogh, who stayed 14 months between 1888 and 1889 and painted over 200 works of art while in Arles, including the much loved The Night Cafe, the Yellow Room, Starry Night Over the Rhone, and L'Arlésienne. It was also in Arles that Van Gogh's infamous ear-severing incident occurred in December 1888. Perhaps surprisingly given the town's importance to van Gogh, none of his works are on display in Arles!

Today, Arles is a bustling tourist centre that still retains a strong medieval flavour thanks to the narrow streets winding between ancient buildings. Walking (or renting a bike) is a joy in this charming city - and just about everything is within walking distance. Today the very same arena (12,000 seats) which was the scene of the Roman games in the first century now hosts the ferias or bull runs and Provencal-style bullfights (courses camarguaises) in which the bull is not killed - a team of athletic men attempt to remove a tassel from its horns without getting injured.

ARLES is a major town on the tourist circuit, its fame sealed by the extraordinarily well-preserved Roman arena, Les Arènes , at the city's heart, and backed by an impressive variety of other stones and monuments, both Roman and medieval. It was the key city of the region in Roman times, then, with Aix, main base of the counts of Provence before unification with France. For centuries it was Marseille's only rival, profiting from the inland trade route up the Rhône whenever the enemies of France were blocking Marseille's port. Arles declined when the railway put an end to this advantage, and it was an inward-looking depressed town that Van Gogh came to in the late nineteenth century. Today it is a staid and conservative place, but comes to life for the Saturday market , which brings in throngs of farmers from the surrounding countryside, and during the various festivals of tauromachie between Easter and All Saints, when the town's frenzy for bulls rivals that of neighbouring Nîmes.

The centre of Arles fits into a neat triangle between boulevard E.-Combes to the east, boulevards Clemenceau and des Lices to the south, and the Rhône to the west. The Musée de l'Arles Antiques is south of the expressway by the river, not far from the end of boulevard Clemenceau; Les Alyscamps is down across the train lines to the southeast. But these apart, all the Roman and medieval monuments are within easy walking distance in this very compact city centre.

Arles has a good number of excellent-quality and cheap restaurants , and if you're looking for quick meals, or just want to watch the world go by, there's a wide choice of brasseries on the main boulevards. Place du Forum is the centre of café life; here you'll find Le Café La Nuit , immaculately recreated à la Van Gogh and open late, and the young and noisy Bistrot Arlésien .

Destination Guides > Europe & Russia > Europe > France > Rhône valley and Provence > Western Provence > Arles

How to get there

Arriving by train eases you gently into the city, with the gare SNCF conveniently located a few blocks to the north of the Arènes. Most buses also arrive here at the adjacent gare routière, though some, including all local buses, stop on the north side of boulevard Georges-Clemenceau just east of rue Gambetta. Rue Jean-Jaurès, with its continuation rue Hôtel-de-Ville, is the main axis of old Arles. At the southern end it meets boulevard Georges-Clemenceau and boulevard des Lices, with the tourist office directly opposite; there's also an annexe in the gare SNCF . You can rent bikes from Peugeot, 15 rue du Pont, or Europbike, at the newspaper kiosk on esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle, and cars from Europcar, Eurorent or Hertz, all on boulevard Victor-Hugo.

The Bullfight

Bullfighting , or more properly tauromachie (roughly, "the art of the bull"), comes in two styles in Arles and the Camargue. In the local courses camarguaises , which are held at fêtes from late spring to early autumn (the most prestigious of which is Arles' Cocarde d'Or in early July), razeteurs run at the bulls in an effort to pluck ribbons and cockades tied to the bulls' horns, cutting them free with special barbed gloves. The drama and grace of the spectacle is in the stylish way the men leap over the barrier away from the bull, and in the competition for prize money between the razeteurs . In this gentler bullfight, people are rarely injured and the bulls are not killed.

More popular, however, is the brutal Spanish-style corrida (late April, early July & September, at Arles), consisting of a strict ritual leading up to the all-but-inevitable death of the bull. Whether you approve or not, tauromachie , which has a history of some centuries here, is your best way of taking part in local life and of experiencing the Roman arena in Arles. The tourist office, local papers and publicity around the arena will give you the details.

Van Gogh in Arles

At the back of the Réattu museum, lanterns line the river wall where Van Gogh used to wander, wearing candles on his hat, watching the night-time light: The Starry Night is the Rhône at Arles. Much of the riverfront and its bars and bistros were destroyed during World War II. Another casualty of the bombing was the "Yellow House" on place Lamartine, where the artist lived before entering the hospital at St-Rémy. However, the café painted in Café de Nuit still stands in place du Forum. Van Gogh had arrived by train in February 1888 to be greeted by snow and a bitter mistral wind. But he started painting straight away, and in this period produced such celebrated canvases as The Sunflowers, Van Gogh's Chair , The Red Vines and The Sower . Van Gogh found few kindred souls in Arles and finally managed to persuade Gauguin to join him. No one knows what provoked the frenzied attack on his friend and the self-mutilation. He was packed off to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on rue du Président-Wilson down from the Musée Arlaten, now the Espace Van Gogh , an academic and cultural centre with arty shops in its arcades and courtyard flower beds recreated according to Van Gogh's painting and descriptions of the hospital garden.

Arles has none of the artist's works but the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, facing the Arènes at 26 Rond-Point des Arènes, exhibits works by contemporary artists inspired by Van Gogh, including Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Hockney and Lichtenstein.

The doorway of the Cathédrale St-Trophime on Arles' central place de la République is one of the most famous examples of twelfth-century Provençal stonecarving in existence. It depicts the Last Judgement, trumpeted by angels playing with the enthusiasm of jazz musicians while the damned are led naked in chains down to hell and the blessed, all draped in long robes, process upwards. The cathedral itself was started in the ninth century on the spot where, in 597 AD, St Augustine was consecrated as the first bishop of the English, and it was largely completed by the twelfth century. A font in the north aisle and an altar illustrating the crossing of the Red Sea in the north transept were both originally Gallo-Roman sarcophagi. The nave is decorated with d'Aubusson tapestries, in which the one depicting Mary Magdalene bathing Christ's feet has a cat jumping from one oil container to another chased by a dog being ridden by a child. There is more superlative Romanesque and Gothic stonecarving in the extraordinarily beautiful cloisters , accessible from place de la République to the right of the cathedral  .

Across place de la République from the cathedral stands the palatial seventeenth-century Hôtel de Ville , inspired by Versailles. You can walk through its vast entrance hall, with its flattened vaulted roof designed to avoid putting extra stress on the Cryptoporticus du Forum below. This is a huge, dark, dank and wonderfully spooky three-sided underground gallery, built by the Romans, possible as a food store, possibly as a barracks for public slaves, but certainly to provide sturdy foundations for the forum above. Access is from rue Balze  , though it may be switched to the Musée Arlaten.

In case you feel that life stopped in Arles - if not after the Romans, then at least after the Middle Ages - head for the Musée Arlaten on rue de la République. The museum was set up in 1896 by Frédéric Mistral, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who was responsible for the turn-of-the-twentieth-century revival of interest in all things Provençal, and whose statue stands in place du Forum. The collections of costumes, documents, tools, pictures and paraphernalia of Provençal life are alternately tedious and intriguing. The evolution of Arlesian dress is charted in great detail for all social classes from the eighteenth century to World War I and there's a mouthwatering life-size scene of a bourgeois Christmas dinner.

Another must-see in Arles is the main collection of the Musée Réattu , housed in a beautiful fifteenth-century priory opposite the Roman baths. Much of it comprises tedious and rigid eighteenth-century works by the museum's founder and his contemporaries, but dotted round this are some good modern works: Zadkine's study in bronze for the two Van Gogh brothers, Mario Prassinos' monochrome studies of the Alpilles, César's Compression 1973 and, best of all, Picasso's Woman with Violin sculpture and 57 ink-and-crayon sketches made in Arles between December 1970 and February 1971. Amongst the split faces and clowns is a beautifully simple portrait of his mother.

Roman Arles

Roman Arles provided grain for most of the western empire and was one of the major ports for trade and shipbuilding. Under Constantine it became the capital of Gaul and reached its height as a world trading centre in the fifth century. Once the empire crumbled, however, Arles found itself isolated between the Rhône, the Alpilles and the marshlands of the Camargue - an isolation that allowed its Roman heritage to be preserved.

A good place to start any tour of Roman Arles is the Musée de l'Arles Antique, west of the town centre on the spit of land between the Rhône and the Canal de Rhône. It is housed in a resolutely contemporary building positioned on the axis of the second-century Cirque Romaine , an enormous chariot racetrack (currently being excavated) that stretches 450m from the museum to the town side of the expressway. The museum is a treat, open-plan, flooded with natural light and immensely spacious. It covers the prehistory of the area, then takes you through the five centuries of Roman rule, from Julius Cæsar's legionary base through Christianization to the period when spices and gems from Africa and Arabia were being traded here. Fabulous mosaics are laid out with walkways above; and there are numerous sarcophagi with intricate sculpting depicting everything from music and lovers to gladiators and Christian miracles.

Back in the centre of Arles, the most impressive Roman monument is the amphitheatre, known as the Arènes , dating from the end of the first century. To give an idea of its size, it used to shelter over two hundred dwellings and three churches built into the two tiers of arches that form its oval surround. This medieval quarter was cleared in 1830 and the Arènes was once more used for entertainment. Today, though missing its third storey and most of the internal stairways and galleries, it is a very dramatic structure and a stunning venue for performances. It can still seat 20,000 spectators.

The Théâtre Antique , just south of the Arènes, comes to life during July, with the Fête du Costume in which local folk groups parade in traditional dress, and the Mosaïque Gitane Romany festival. The theatre is nowhere near as well preserved as the arena, with only one pair of columns standing, all the statuary removed and the sides of the stage littered with broken bits of stone.

At the river end of rue Hôtel-de-Ville, the Thermes de Constantin , which may well have been the biggest Roman baths in Provence, are all that remain of the emperor's palace that extended along the waterfront. The Roman forum was up the hill on the site of place du Forum , still the centre of life in Arles. You can see the pillars of an ancient temple embedded in the corner of the Nord-Pinus hotel.

The Romans had their burial ground southwest of the centre, and it was used by well-to-do Arlesians well into the Middle Ages. Now only one alleyway, foreshortened by a train line, is preserved. To reach Les Alyscamps , follow avenue des Alyscamps from boulevard des Lices. Sarcophagi still line the shaded walk, whose tree trunks are azure blue in Van Gogh's rendering. There are numerous tragedy masks, too, though any with special decoration have long since been moved to serve as municipal gifts, as happened often in the seventeenth century, or to reside in the museums. But there is still magic to this walk, which ends at the ruins of a Romanesque church.