Marseille is the rare Mediterranean port where the best things cost nothing: forts, terraced gardens, a striped cathedral and a coastline of white limestone. Three days here run on €1.80 bus tickets, Noailles market food and a lot of stairs.
The MuCEM's 12th-century fort and its Jardin des Migrations are free every day, roughly 7:00-20:00 in summer. Fifteen terraced beds of Mediterranean plants, plus the black footbridge over the harbour mouth.
Marseille's banded green-and-white cathedral, built 1852-1893 from Cassis limestone and Florentine marble. Free entry, open 10:00-18:30 except Mondays. The vaulted arcades beneath it shelter shaded benches.
The 1869 water-tower palace ends the Canal de Marseille with a colonnade and a cascade of stone lions. Park and fountains are free, open about 7:00-20:00. The Musée des Beaux-Arts inside is €6, free the first Sunday monthly.
A fishing cove of thirty-odd wooden pointus wedged under the Corniche viaduct, reached by staircases off Boulevard des Dardanelles. Nothing to pay — locals sit on the harbour wall at dusk while swifts work the arches.
Noailles' market runs 8:00-19:00 Monday to Saturday just behind the Canebière. Comorian, Algerian and Tunisian stalls sell produce far under supermarket prices — a kilo of tomatoes around €2, mint bunches about €1.
A Tunisian counter where the brik à l'oeuf arrives folded and blistering for around €2.50 and a full plate of couscous stays under €10. Standing room, paper plates, and a queue out the door by 13:00 most days.
The square fills with hundreds of stalls on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, roughly 8:00-13:00 — olives, spices, clothes, cheap espadrilles. Traders discount the last crates of fruit as they pack up.
The quayside bar from Pagnol's Marius trilogy still pours pastis for about €3 and a demi-pression near €3.50, undercutting anything on the sunnier north quay. Zinc counter, no table service, football on the TV.
Bus 21 from Castellane to Luminy costs €1.80 and drops you at the trailhead for a 45-minute descent to a turquoise inlet. Entry is free, but a compulsory online reservation applies daily from late June to early September.
Seventeen hectares of lake, rose garden and 18th-century bastide, all free and open from about 6:00 to 21:00 in summer. The shaded lawns behind the château are where Marseillais spread out their own picnics.
A free sand beach on the Corniche with showers, toilets and summer lifeguards — no entry fee, unlike the Catalans. Bus 83 runs the seafront for €1.80. The water stays calmer here than at Prado when the mistral blows.
Three kilometres of seafront walkway backed by a bench long enough to have been claimed as the world's longest, facing the Frioul islands and Château d'If. Costs nothing, and the 19:00-21:00 summer light is the point.