Bassins à Flot

Bassins à Flot in Bordeaux sits inside a wartime U-boat base whose walls still hold the memory of a twenty-two-month construction push that began in September 1941. The guide follows the roughly six thousand five hundred workers driven through the site, over a third of them Spanish Republican refugees, and the concrete, piling and armoured chambers they built by hand. It traces where the money from the project went, and where it didn't, and what became of the base once the war ended and demolition proved too costly to carry out. A memorial nearby names the workers who never walked away.