Marseille, France's oldest city and its old port

Most French cities grew around a cathedral, a castle or a river crossing. Marseille grew around a harbour. The Vieux-Port is a long, narrow inlet running straight into the city from the sea, sheltered by the hills on either side, and it is the reason anybody settled here at all. It is still the city's living room: the quays are where Marseille walks, meets, eats, argues and watches the boats, and every road of consequence seems to end at the water.

The Greeks in the inlet

Around 600 BC, Greek colonists from Phocaea, a city on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, sailed into the inlet and founded a trading post they called Massalia. The Greeks called the harbour the Lacydon, and their arrival is why Marseille is usually described as the oldest city in France. The legend the Greeks themselves told is that a local chieftain's daughter was to choose a husband at a feast, and chose the Greek captain, bringing the land with her; whatever the truth of it, the colony prospered. Massalia traded wine, oil and ideas up the Rhône into Gaul and along the coast, founding daughter towns of its own, and it stayed independent for centuries, until it backed the losing side against Julius Caesar and fell to his siege in 49 BC.

Not much of the Greek city stands. Its remains lie under the streets on the north side of the port, around the hill of Le Panier, the old quarter of steep lanes, stairs, laundry and small squares that climbs up from the quay. In the Jardin des Vestiges, beside the Centre Bourse shopping centre, excavated remains of the ancient port and city walls lie in the open air, and the Musée d'Histoire de Marseille close by tells the long story from the Greeks onward. It is an odd and rather Marseille juxtaposition, a Greek quay beside a car park.

Two forts that faced the wrong way

Marseille has always had an independent streak, and the French crown did not always like it. In the 1660s, to subdue that independent spirit, Louis XIV ordered new forts at the mouth of the port: Fort Saint-Nicolas on the south side, and a rebuilt Fort Saint-Jean on the north. The detail every guide points out is that the guns of the new forts were turned not out to sea but inward, at the town. They were there to keep Marseille in order.

The city kept its temper anyway. In the Revolution, the volunteers who marched from Marseille to Paris sang a new war song as they went, and Paris called it after them: the Marseillaise, now the national anthem.

Fort Saint-Jean has had a happier modern life. It was restored and joined by footbridge to the Mucem, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, a cube of glass wrapped in a lattice of dark concrete that opened in 2013, the year Marseille was a European Capital of Culture. The walk from the fort's ramparts across the footbridge, with the open sea on one side and the port on the other, is one of the pleasures of the city whether or not you go into the museum.

The old port in the morning

The best time to see the Vieux-Port is early. On the Quai des Belges, at the head of the harbour, fishermen sell the night's catch from trestle tables beside their boats: rascasse, red mullet, sea bream, octopus and whatever else came up in the nets, still wet, often still moving, and loudly priced. This is where the fish for bouillabaisse, Marseille's famous fish stew, has traditionally been bought. The restaurants round the port and along the corniche that serve it properly bring the fish to the table separately from the broth, and are not cheap; the stew was once a fisherman's supper made of whatever would not sell, and has come up in the world.

Overhead at the same end of the quay is the Ombrière, a large, thin canopy of polished steel designed by Norman Foster's practice, a roof without walls whose underside reflects the people walking beneath. Children wave at it. So, if no one is watching, do adults.

From the quays, the eye goes up to Notre-Dame de la Garde, the nineteenth-century basilica on the city's highest point, built on the remains of an older fort, with a great gilded Virgin on its tower. The people of Marseille call her the Bonne Mère, the good mother, and she watches over sailors and the city alike. The climb up is long and steep, and there are buses; from the terrace the whole city, the port, the islands of the Frioul and the Château d'If lie spread out below in the hard southern light.

Cycling from Marseille

Marseille is a natural end or start for a journey through Provence and along the coast, and both of the holidays here pass through it.

Explore's seven-night Cycle Marseille to Barcelona leaves the city westwards along the coast, by Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône into the Camargue, with Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and the walled town of Aigues-Mortes, then Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone, Sète and Béziers, on to Collioure, and over into Catalonia for Figueres, the Greek ruins at Empúries, L'Estartit and Peratallada. It departs in May, June, September and October.

Explore's seven-night Cycle Provence works through the country inland: Avignon, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Barbentane and the abbey at Frigolet, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Pernes-les-Fontaines, Gordes and Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, Mormoiron and Mont Ventoux, with Marseille also on its list. It departs in April, May, June, September and October.

Whichever way the wheels are pointing, keep an hour for the Vieux-Port in the early morning, when the fish come in, and another for the evening, when Marseille comes out to sit by the water. The city is loud, scruffy in places and entirely itself, and it has been at this inlet for more than two and a half thousand years.