Park
Parc Valmer
Cor Président John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 13007 Marseille
Public park around a nineteenth-century seafront mansion, its terraces once torn up in an illegal demolition.
This guide to Parc Valmer in Marseille starts at a patch of stone on the villa's rear wall that looks a little too new, and the developer whose excavators tore into two historic terraces there in April 2021. It follows the permit he actually held, the excuse he gave for going beyond it, and the city officials who raced to the scene that same day, one of them calling the damage monstrous. Look for the tropical plantings nearby, brought home by the villa's original oil-merchant owner.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.