Marseille and the sea: A portrait of the millennia-old port city that is hosting Olympic sailing

Her black headscarf flying up, a teen jumped into the sparkling Mediterranean from a concrete pier at a city marina, then scrambled back to shore and onto a giant paddle board for a quick tour with a dozen excited comrades.

They were bused in for a swimming camp from a social services center in the mostly Muslim, North African-origin neighborhoods that ring Marseille, which is hosting the 2024 Olympicsailing competition at the opposite end of its spectacular, monument-fringed bay.

The millennia-old port is a crossroads of cultures and faiths, where the sea is ever present but not equally accessible, and the beauty and cosmopolitan flair rub shoulders with enclaves of poverty and exclusion even more intimately than in the rest of France.

“There are kids who see the sea from home, but have never come,” said Mathias Sintes, a supervisor at the Corbière marina for the Grand Bleu Association, which has held camps for about 3,000 marginalized children — 50% of whom, he estimates, didn’t know how to swim. “The first goal is to teach them to save themselves.”

SINK OR SWIM

Brahim Timricht, who grew up in the northern neighborhoods known as the “quartiers nord,“ founded the association more than two decades ago to bring children to enjoy the sea that shimmers below their often-dilapidated high-rises on the rocky cliffs.

Then he realized that many weren’t learning basic swimming in school — a requirement for elementary students in France — and figured he could take advantage of the warm summer months to introduce them to that skill.

“Then the mothers told me they still wouldn’t go to the beach, because they didn’t know how to swim and were afraid, so we started programs with them,” Timricht said as dozens of children happily splashed under the hot July sun a few days before the opening of the Olympic sailing competition.

The lack of pools for school programs is a sign of “social and economic segregation,” said Jean Cugier, who teaches physical education in a high school in the quartiers nord and belongs to the national union of PE teachers.

Over the past academic year, he’s been taking 30 sixth-graders 45 minutes by bus to a pool where two lanes were reserved for them — an unsustainable model, he said, that he’s hoping to modify with pool-based summer camps.

While the city has discussed using the Olympic marina after the Games — as Paris plans to do with an Olympic pool — the sea is too chilly to swim in during most of the school year. So the only concrete answer to the pool shortage is building more infrastructure, Cugier believes.

Another issue complicating swimming education, according to the Ministry of Education, has been the medical certificates that parents bring to excuse children from class. Officials say these are often fake and driven by the desire of some conservative Muslim families not to have boys and girls together at a pool.

Pools have become a flashpoint in France’s struggle over its unique approach to “laïcité” — loosely translated as “secularism” and strictly regulating the role of religion in the public space, including schools and even the Olympics.

But sports are also a way out of the margins. One of France's soccer greats, Zinedine Zidane, who carried the Olympic torch in the Paris opening ceremony, was born in the most notorious of Marseille's quartiers nord. And soccer remains the unifying passion of Marseille's residents, who routinely flock to cheer home team Olympique de Marseille at the Vélodrome stadium — one of the venues for Olympic soccer matches.

For the boys and girls at the Corbière marina, the overall seaside experience has been a chance to meet new people from outside their neighborhood.

“They don’t want to leave,” said one of the group leaders, Sephora Saïd, on the camp’s last day. She had worn a hijab during the outing, including while paddle-boarding.

SEA, SEA EVERYWHERE

The sea as an entry and a meeting point is engrained in the very DNA of Marseille. Founded by Greek colonists 2,600 years ago as a trading post, it is France’s oldest city, and its second largest.

“Before it’s a city, Marseille is a port,” said Fabrice Denise, director of the Museum of Marseille History, built next to the Greek archeological site in what is still the city’s center. “If you want to understand all that’s extraordinary about it, including the realities of cosmopolitanism, you need to understand its multi-century history as a port.”

Today’s port, the Mediterranean’s third largest in cargo tonnage, includes everything from refineries to a busy cruise ship area and extends along nearly 40 kilometers (25 miles). But it all started in a small inlet that is today’s top tourist attraction, the Vieux Port.

Large boats built of wood and caulked with cotton and fiber carried transforming cargos like grapevines, Denise said. The trade expanded north along the Rhone River in what is now one of France’s most celebrated wine-producing regions.

At the end of the harbor, a small boatyard still restores a handful of boats built in the old way. They were used for fishing until a few decades ago but now are too expensive to maintain for utilitarian purposes.

Not far away are the forts that King Louis XIV added in the 17th century to protect the port and the military arsenal he established. The small city became a metropolis.

Religious diversity arrived by sea too — Christians in reality and in myth, one of the most popular ones being that Mary Magdalen herself sailed to Marseille, which is commemorated with a large boat procession each year.

Centuries later, and increasingly since decolonization, Muslims from North Africa flocked to Marseille’s shores. Of the city’s 870,000 residents, some 300,000 trace their roots to Algeria alone.

In the narrow streets uphill from the Vieux Port, Arabic rings from market stalls, cafés and couscous restaurants — the second-most spoken language in the city. Marseille’s French itself is unique, incorporating not only a distinctive accent but words from the countryside’s Provençal language, said Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a linguist and professor at the University of Aix-Marseille. He is co-author of the French-language book “Marseille for Dummies.”

On its cover, as on the background of most photos including those of the Olympic regattas, stands the hilltop black-and-white-striped 19th century basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde, topped by a nearly 10-meter (33-foot) gold-covered statue of the Virgin Mary looking out to sea. It’s known as “la Bonne Mère” — the good mother.

“The Bonne Mère, it’s almost a pagan symbol,” quipped Gasquet-Cyrus, who says he i an atheist but still goes to visit. “She’s the protector of the city.”

The church welcomes around 2.5 million visitors a year, many for its daily Masses and more on its wide terrace. Its 360-degree views encompass the new and old ports, the villa-studded neighborhoods where the Olympic marina is nestled as well as the blocky towers of the quartiers nord.

“You can see Marseille, and the sea, and the horizon, all under her benevolent gaze,” said the basilica’s rector, the Rev. Olivier Spinosa. “It’s easier to see beauty from up high, and it invites us to work on beautiful things when we’re down below.”

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