Marseille

Marseille has spent decades being described to you before you arrive: France's roughest city, or its sun-bleached Provençal port, depending on who's selling. Both are lazy. This is the country's oldest city, founded by Greek sailors around 600 BC, where the call to prayer drifts over the fish market and a 60-euro bouillabaisse sits ten minutes from a chickpea fritter that costs less than a coffee. It faces the sea rather than Paris, and it has never much cared what Paris thinks. Come for the order and you'll be disappointed. Come for the friction and it delivers.

When to go

May, June and September are the window. The heat is in the high twenties, the sea is warm enough to swim, and the crowds that swamp July and August have thinned. The thing nobody puts on the postcard is the mistral, the cold dry north wind that can blow at 100km/h and arrives mostly in winter and spring; it clears the sky to a hard blue but will end any plan to sit outside. July and August are hot and busy but, usefully, the months the mistral is rarest. Skip deep winter unless you want the city to yourself with the wind for company.

What it's actually like

The Vieux-Port is the hinge. By morning it's a working quay with a small fish market selling that night's catch off folding tables; by evening the same water reflects the rooftop bars above it. Walk uphill into Le Panier, the oldest quarter, and the souvenir shops have largely given way to ceramicists and soap ateliers around the 17th-century Vieille Charité almshouse. Drop downhill into Noailles and you're in North Africa: the Marché des Capucins spilling spices and flatbread, La Rose du Tunis turning out pastries, the loudest and most alive streets in the city.

Past the centre, the Calanques begin: white-limestone fjords with turquoise water at the southern edge of town, reached by boat from the Vieux-Port or on foot from Callelongue, where the bus line ends. On the city's highest hill sits Notre-Dame de la Garde, the gilded basilica the Marseillais call la Bonne Mère. Bus 60 climbs to it for the one view that takes in the whole sprawl. None of it is tidy. That's the point.

The neighbourhood you want

Base yourself in or just above the Vieux-Port, on the Le Panier side. You'll walk to the MuCEM, the ferries and the restaurants, and Metro line 1 at Vieux-Port runs you anywhere else. Doubles run roughly 90 to 160 euros in shoulder season. Cours Julien, fifteen minutes uphill, is the alternative if nightlife and street art matter more than the water; it's cheaper and noisier after dark. Avoid booking blind around Saint-Charles station, which is convenient for trains and little else.

Don't miss

Pizza at Chez Jeannot in the Vallon des Auffes, the tiny fishing cove the metro doesn't reach (bus 83). Order the "moit-moit", half cheese and half anchovy, eaten over the water where the cove's restaurants have fed fishermen since 1949, a pastis cut with cold water in front of you. Then walk twenty minutes to the Four des Navettes at 136 rue Sainte, baking the boat-shaped orange-blossom navette biscuit to the same recipe since 1781, beside the Abbey of Saint-Victor. Buy a dozen for the train. For the canonical view, the ferry to the Château d'If, Dumas's prison island, leaves the Vieux-Port and takes about twenty minutes.