Arles

Arles stands on the western edge of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur as one of France’s most expansive communes, embracing 758.93 square kilometres—an expanse comparable to the state of Singapore—yet sheltering just over fifty thousand inhabitants. Nestled at the fork of the Rhône, where the river divides and descends into the vast wetlands of the Camargue, the city has for two millennia served as a crossroads of culture, faith and art. Arles’s enduring legacy, from its status as a Roman capital in Gallia Narbonensis to its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981, derives equally from its monumental remains and from the creative souls who have found inspiration in its sun-bleached façades and pink-earth horizons.

A traveler approaching Arles by road first traverses fields skirting the Rhône, the grey ribbon of water reflecting a sky often streaked with mistral-driven clouds. The mistral wind, fierce and sudden, sweeps down from the Alps, chilling the air even in late winter and gifting the landscape with those pellucid days beloved by artists. In summer, temperatures climb to daily averages of 22 to 24 °C, and the light saturates the ochre stone of façades and ancient columns alike; in winter, despite a mean monthly temperature of 7 °C, frost may descend abruptly under the same restless wind. Rainfall of roughly 636 mm per year falls evenly between September and May, lending a muted greenness to the Camargue’s brackish marshes, where greater flamingos quarter the skies and Camargue horses patter along canals carved centuries ago.

The imprint of Rome remains everywhere. The amphitheatre, erected in the first or second century BC, still rises above the Place des Arènes. Each Easter and every first weekend of September the Roman walls ring with the low thunder of Spanish-style bullfights—corridas in which bulls meet their end in the ring after a dawn encierro through closed streets—while throughout the summer the same arena hosts courses camarguaises, in which agile participants seek to wrest ornate tassels from the bulls’ horns without drawing blood. A standard ticket to the amphitheatre costs €9 (reduced €7, free for under eighteen), and yet paying any heed to the price is to miss the marrow of experience, where human adrenaline and animal power entwine beneath the same vaulted seating that once cheered gladiators.

A short stroll leads to the Théâtre Antique, its stage framed by soaring columns of the late first century BC. Open daily from 10:00 to 18:00, it charges €5 for admission (free on the first Sunday of each month and for under-eighteen-year-olds), yet the entry fee cannot account for the hush that descends when one stands upon its stone benches and imagines the ghostly chorus of Roman actors. Nearby, the cryptoportiques—an underground gallery that once underpinned the Roman forum—reveal their horseshoe silhouette beneath the Hôtel de Ville. These vaulted corridors, built in the same twilight of the Republic and imperially remodelled, require no ticket beyond the curiosity that draws one down to their cool, earthen silence.

Eastward lie the Thermes de Constantin, the remains of imperial baths whose vast substructures once housed frigidarium and caldarium alike, and beyond them stands the Church of Saint Trophime. Consecrated in the twelfth century, Saint Trophime is a masterwork of Provençal Romanesque architecture, its portal adorned with precise bas-reliefs depicting Apostles and Last Judgment in relief so crisp that every robe fold seems motile. The adjacent cloister, for which an additional €5.50 grants prolonged contemplation, offers a quiet courtyard where columns of varied capitals trace a rhythmic colonnade, each carving a different bestiary or biblical scene into the limestone.

Arles’s connection to faith predates the medieval cloister. In late antique times, the city was the seat of the archdiocese of both Caesarius and Hilary of Arles, whose sermons resonated through early Christendom. Their legacy lingers in the sense of sacred ground palpable among crumbling mosaics and fallen capitals.

Yet Arles is neither mausoleum nor museum. In 1888, Vincent van Gogh arrived drawn by shimmering light and provincial character. Over fourteen turbulent months he produced more than three hundred canvases and drawings—sunflowers aflame in yellow impasto, the Pont de Langlois triptych sketched in cobalt diaphanous as the drawbridge lifted, the Alyscamps shaded by poplars along an early Christian necropolis where he rendered the gnarled trunks and autumn leaves in urgent strokes. Van Gogh lodged in a converted hospital courtyard that today serves as the Espace Van Gogh—free to enter—and visitors still feel the tremor of his brush in those silent arches.

The city’s artistic lineage extends beyond Van Gogh. Picasso, Gauguin and the Arles-born painter Jacques Réattu all found here vistas worthy of canvas, and Réattu’s own museum—housed in his seventeenth-century family home at 10 rue du Grand Prieuré—hosts paintings and sketchbooks alongside a single Picasso that partners his eclectic holdings. Open Tuesday through Sunday, hours shift seasonally: 10:00 to 17:00 from November through February and until 18:00 from March through October. Admission is €8 (reduced €5), a modest sum against the weight of brush and pigment.

A broader array of antiquities converges at the Musée de l’Arles et de la Provence antiques on the Presqu’île-du-Cirque-Romain, where Gallo-Roman statues, funerary stele and mosaic pavements speak in silent fragments of provincial prosperity. Telephone inquiries at +33 4 13 31 51 03 precede a visit to scarce vestiges of the Roman circus at the museum’s northeast flank. Nearby, the Museon Arlaten—an evocative ethnographic collection of Provençal life ensconced in an elegant Jesuit chapel—preserves folk costumes, tools and oral traditions under vaulted ceilings. Its doors open Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 18:00; full price is €8, with concessions at €5.

Since 1970, the Rencontres d’Arles has transformed the city into a crucible of contemporary photography each summer, drawing dozens of venues—including the French national school of photography—and showcasing emerging voices alongside masters of the medium. The city’s publishing heartbeat also pulses here in the form of Actes Sud, whose imprint has introduced authors from Paul Auster to Jean-Claude Izzo to readers around the globe. In recent years, the LUMA Foundation and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles have joined municipal forces with the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz and Lee Ufan Foundations to plant art studios and exhibition spaces amid former industrial buildings, catalysing a surge of galleries that now punctuate narrow streets and sunlit squares.

Arles’s place in living culture found international expression when Marseille-Provence assumed the European Capital of Culture mantle in 2013. To inaugurate that year, Groupe F orchestrated a pyrotechnic tableau on the Rhône’s banks—bridges awash in fire and reflection—ushering in the unveiling of a new wing at the Musée Départemental Arles Antique. The expansion, sited beside the Roman circus’s semicircular embankments, achieved a dialogue between minimalist modernity and imperial remnants, anchoring Arles as both site and subject of cultural reinvention.

Beyond the city limits lie destinations that repay even the most leisurely bicycle tour. Northeast, Abbaye de Montmajour—founded in 948—stands as a ruinous monument to Benedictine grandeur; for €6, one explores vaulted chambers, chapels and bell towers draped in lichen. Further along stretches the windmill landscape of Fontvieille, immortalized by Daudet and rendered corporeal in four surviving moulins, two of which welcome €2 entry into their timbered interiors. Southward, the Camargue unfolds in saline pans and reed-lined canals: a hundred species of birds flit among camargue bulls and white stallions, while salt grains crystallize into pink caustic ridges. And to the southeast, the Réserve Naturelle des Marais du Vigueirat thickets over twelve hundred hectares of marshland, where more than two thousand species of flora and fauna thrive under provincial protection.

Fragments of modern storytelling have also left their mark here. Scenes from Ronin’s midnight chases threaded through narrow streets; the reflective solitude of At Eternity’s Gate echoed Van Gogh’s own anguish in the spaces where he once painted; and the slapstick energy of Taxi 3 tore around Arles’s winding lanes. Yet filmic evocations remain secondary to the place itself: a living palimpsest of conquest and cultivation, faith and fervour, pigments dimmed only by time’s unending turnover.

To enter Arles today is to walk between epochs. The combined ticket option—valid for one month and priced at €15—admits holders to the amphitheatre, the antique theatre, the cryptoportiques, the cloister of Saint Trophime and the Réattu Museum; for €19, one extends passage to every site and museum for half a year. In this, as in every element of Arles’s mosaic, the tangible and the intangible intertwine: Roman stones bear the footfalls of bullfighters, cloistered monks rehearse ancient chants in cool shade, and the same light that captivated Van Gogh continues to baptize horizon and ruin alike in ochre and gold.

Arles does not promise spectacle in the manner of larger metropolises, nor does it woo the traveler with forced revelry. Instead, it offers the slow burn of place memory, the quiet accumulation of detail—the scrape of a stone column under palm, the tang of salt in the wind, the way late-afternoon sun transforms colonnades into filigree. In these interstices of history and geography, the visitor finds a city that resists facile summation, unfolding instead with the subtle insistence of an inscribed fragment, awaiting the contemplation it so richly deserves.