Frioul archipelago

The Friuli Islands (French archipelago you frioul or Îles du Friuli ) are about four kilometers west of the French port city of Marseille in the Mediterranean. The archipelago consists of four islands, which are inhabited by about 100 people together and have an area of about 200 ha.

Islands

The islands bear the following names:

• Pomègues in the south
• Ratonneau in the North
• Ile d'If in the east between the two main islands and
• Tiboulen in the west of Ratonneau, the smallest of the islands.

The two largest islands are Ratonneau Pomègues and since 1822 by a causeway that connected Digue de Berry. Pomègues is 2.7 km long and Ratonneua has a length of about 2.5 km. The highest elevation is 89 m on Pomègues. Tiboulen is the Provencal term for petit bout d' île, which means as much as the island tip or Inselstückchen. Located on the Ile d'If, in the former prison, Château d'If, play parts of the novel The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

History

The islands were used in the 18th century during the plague ( 1720) as a quarantine station for arriving from the city of Marseille. The waters and the landscapes of the archipelago were declared in 2002 by the City Council to Marseilles Maritime Parc des Îles du Frioul and become a kind of nature reserve. Camping and open fires are prohibited it. Many tourists, especially divers visit the islands, which are just 15 minutes by boat from the port.

The Digue de Berry

The Digue de Berry or Berry - dike is a in the years 1822-1824 erected by order of the French government to the plans of Michel Robert Penchaud in a cove off the Îles de Friuli in the Mediterranean dam connects the Pomègues with Ratonneau. It was named after Charles Ferdinand de Bourbon, duc de Berry.

The reason for the construction was a 1820 erupted in the cities located on the Mediterranean yellow fever epidemic. From this hitherto unknown disease, the commercial city of Marseille was affected. The dam, a kind of bulwark, behind which the port Dieudonné, an approximately 25 -hectare quarantine tank, was formed and a hospital was built, should ward off the risk of a new epidemic, as it was 100 years ago came in the form of the plague of the city. Today called Port Friuli, this port where the supply ships on and take it, mainly used by sailors.

Ratonneau

This also by Michel Robert Penchaud (1772-1833), architect of the city of Marseille and the departments of Bouches -du -Rhône on Ratonneau planned hospital should be a model sanitary facility with a for that time downright radical hygiene level that all danger of infection ward and therefore should be subject to a prison resembling order. The location was ideal insofar as Pomègues and Ratonneau before Marseille lie ( and the neighboring Château d'If prison was anyway ). Named after Maria Carolina of Naples and Sicily, the wife of the Duc de Berry Hôpital Caroline was opened after five years of construction in 1828.

Later it was taken over by the army, who used it as a temporary storage for the operating in the North African colonies soldiers. Today the former hospital serves during the summer season for exhibitions and other cultural events.