Château d'If

Château d'If

A fortress in the sea

Just off the coast of Marseille, in the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean, lies a tiny rocky island called If — and almost the whole of it is covered by a square, stern fortress: the Château d'If. With its thick walls and round corner towers rising straight from the sea, it looks both grand and grim. Though built to guard the great port of Marseille, it became famous for something quite different: as a prison, and as the setting of one of the most thrilling adventure stories ever written.

Built to guard Marseille

The Château d'If was built in the 1520s on the orders of King Francis I, who saw that the island was perfectly placed to defend the busy harbour of Marseille against attack from the sea. Squat and strong, with walls built to mount cannon, the fortress stood guard over the approaches to the city.

But its position — on an island surrounded by deep water, cut off from the mainland — also made it ideal for another purpose. It was very hard to escape from a prison surrounded by the sea, and so the Château d'If soon became a place to lock away prisoners.

A notorious prison

For more than three hundred years, the Château d'If served as a prison, and a feared one. Many kinds of prisoners were held there over the centuries, from ordinary criminals to political prisoners and people imprisoned for their religious beliefs. The wealthier prisoners could pay for better rooms with windows, while the poorest were thrown into dark, damp dungeons with little hope of release.

Cut off on its island, with the sea as its bars, the Château d'If gained a reputation as a place from which there was no escape.

The Count of Monte Cristo

The fortress owes its worldwide fame to a book. In the 1840s the French writer Alexandre Dumas published The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most famous adventure novels of all time. In the story, the hero, Edmond Dantès, is unjustly imprisoned in the Château d'If, where he spends long years before making a daring and dramatic escape, and then returns, transformed and disguised, to take his revenge.

The book was so popular that visitors began flocking to the Château d'If to see the very place where the fictional hero had been held. Today a cell in the fortress is even pointed out as "Dantès' cell", though of course he was only a character in a story.

Visiting today

Visitors take a short boat trip from Marseille across the bay to the island, where they can explore the fortress, peer into the cells and dungeons, and imagine the lives of the real prisoners — and of the famous fictional one. From the walls there are wonderful views back across the water to Marseille and out over the Mediterranean. Grim, dramatic and made immortal by a great novel, the Château d'If is one of the most intriguing fortresses in France.