La Ciotat

The essentials of La Ciotat

Pale limestone steps drop from a row of café awnings into the old harbour of La Ciotat, where the fishing boats sit so close together their rails touch. Beyond the breakwater, the Mediterranean is the colour of bottle glass, and the cranes of the shipyard stand over it like a line of herons.

The town is small enough to cross on foot before the coffee cools, and it keeps the rhythm of a working port. In the early morning the quays smell of diesel and salt. Fishermen mend nets on the stone edge of the harbour while the first trains come in along the coast line, and the shutters of the bakeries go up one by one along the narrow streets behind the front. Light comes low across the roofs of the old quarter, turning the ochre walls gold, then white. By late afternoon the sun slides behind the hills and the square fills with people who have no particular reason to hurry. Evenings here are unhurried. People sit outside longer than they intend, talking about nothing much, and the lamps along the quay come on reflected twice, once in the water and once in the glass of the bars.

What makes La Ciotat itself, rather than any other stretch of Provençal coast, is its history with moving pictures. The Eden, a plain old theatre near the centre, is where the Lumière brothers first showed their films to a paying audience in 1895, and it still holds that quiet, slightly dusty air of a place that remembers being the start of something. Walk out from there and the shipyard reminds you that this was also a working town, one that built and repaired hulls for generations. Its gates and cranes are part of the skyline, and the men who worked there are still spoken of in the cafés with a kind of affection.

Further out, the coastline changes character. The Bec de l'Aigle, a rocky headland, pushes into the sea with a view back across the bay, and the small coves and clear inlets beyond it, such as the Mugel, are the places locals go when the town gets too busy in summer. Pine trees grow down almost to the water on the slopes, and the rock is pale and smoothed by wind. Out on the water, the Île Verte sits low and green, a shape you learn to read as the tide changes the colour of the sea around it. Swimmers come in from the stony beaches with salt drying white on their shoulders, and the afternoon wind rises from the south as if on cue.

It is difficult to leave La Ciotat once the rhythm has got into the body. You find yourself returning to the same harbour steps at the same hour, watching the light move across the old façades and the boats shift on their lines. The sea here is not a backdrop but the thing the town is built around, and it asks very little of you except that you stay long enough to notice it.