Bassins des Lumières
Cavernous concrete U-boat pens turned into immersive digital art projections across pools and towering walls.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Bassins des Lumières in Bordeaux traces the sculptor Regis Pedros carving a monument outside these walls in 2012, and the story he was really finishing. It goes back to September 1941, when Nazi Germany began pouring this U-boat bunker from hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of concrete using thousands of forced laborers, over three thousand of them Spanish Republicans who had already fled a lost civil war. More than sixty of those workers died here, some in accidents, some from exhaustion, before the base finally opened in May of 1943.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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