Last modified: 2004-02-28 by ivan sache
Keywords: bouches-du-rhone | ciotat (la) | yacht club |
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La Ciotat is a city of 31,000 inhabitants, located at the end of a
wide bay on the Mediterranean Sea, locally called Golfe
d'Amour (Love Gulf). This name is said to have been coined by the
French poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) because of the swift
variations in weather and colours over the landscape, which also
attracted painters such as Georges Braque (1882-1963). La Ciotat has
ca. 15 km of beaches.
The weather in La Ciotat is particularly pleasant because the city is
protected on the west by the cliffs of Cap Canaille (394 m a.s.l.,
the highest cliffs in Europe) and the pudding stone rocks of Bec
de l'Aigle (Eagle's Beak). La Ciotat is therefore the French city
with the lowest number of rainy days per year.
Less than one mile off La Ciotat, the Ile Verte (Green Island)
is a small island of 13 hectares, covered with a pine forest.
Geologically speaking, the Ile Verte and the Bec de
l'Aigle are the remains of the estuary of a huge river which
flowed from the the former Tyrrhenian Continent (which included
Corsica, Sardinia
and the Balearic Islands) into a wide sea
located on the current site of Provence.
Remains of human activity in La Ciotat dates back to the late Neolithic, as proved by paleontological findings in the Terreveine cave. The first port was established in the Vth century BP.
The city was granted a municipal chart (communs) in 1429 and developed mainly in the XV-XVIth centuries. In the XVIth century, several members of the Genoese aristocracy emigrated to La Ciotat and increased the wealth of the city. A shipyard was founded in La Ciotat in 1622. In 1836, Louis Benet industrialized the shipyard, which remained the main source of wealth for the city until its closure at the end of the 1980s. Most of the shipyard activity was outdoors thanks to the clement weather, and the huge launching pads and cranes are still a part of the lanscape of La Ciotat. The main customers of the shipyard were the rich shipowners of Marseilles.
La Ciotat is the birth city of two main inventions of the XXth century, cinema and petanque.
At the end of the XIXth century, the manufacturer Antoine Lumière, from Lyon, bought in La Ciotat an estate he called Le Château du Clos des Plages. His sons Louis (1864-1948) and Auguste (1862-1954) invented the Cinématographe. One of their first films, shown for the first time in the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895, was L'arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat (The train coming in the