Cite de la Mer

The museum occupies the Gare Maritime Transatlantique, an Art Deco terminal of 1933, and it stands on the quay where Titanic made her last stop on 10 April 1912, taking on two hundred and seventy-four passengers before heading west; an exhibition covers the emigration traffic through Cherbourg and the ship's call here. The centrepiece is Le Redoutable, France's first ballistic missile submarine, decommissioned and brought inside the building, the largest submarine open to the public anywhere; visitors walk its full length through the compartments. An aquarium with a deep tank and a bathyscaphe complete the site.

History

The transatlantic terminal, the largest Art Deco monument in France, was built from 1928 by René Levavasseur with the engineers Chalos and Fleury, in reinforced concrete with stone imitating granite, and was inaugurated on 30 July 1933; nicknamed Notre-Dame des Queens after the Cunard liners, it had a 240 m train hall and a transatlantic hall under a 70 m clock tower, and could take four trains and two liners at once. Badly damaged in 1944, it was partly rebuilt from 1948 and reopened in 1952, then abandoned in the 1970s and partly demolished before being listed as a historic monument in 1989 and 2000. The idea of a museum around the Redoutable, France's first nuclear submarine, arose when it was being dismantled at the end of the 1980s; the project, designed by the architect Jean-François Milou within the old terminal, became the second most visited paid site in the Manche after Mont-Saint-Michel, welcoming its 4,000,000th visitor in September 2019 (Wikipedia, Cité de la Mer).

What's there

• Le Redoutable - the largest submarine open to visitors, walked end to end.
• The Titanic quay - the terminal where her last passengers boarded.
• The Art Deco hall - the 1933 transatlantic terminal building.
• The deep aquarium - a tall tank with an abyssal display.

When to go

Year-round; the museum is indoors and suits Cherbourg's weather. It closes for a maintenance period in winter. School holidays are busy and the submarine queues.

Practical notes

The submarine has narrow passages and steep ladders, unsuitable for limited mobility or claustrophobia. Queues for it build. Cherbourg is a long trip from Paris.

Nearby

La Hague lies west; Barfleur is east.

Key facts