The best way to get up to speed on history is the Musee Maritime, which has just reopened after a 10 year rebuild. If museums strike you as dull, think again. The Musee Maritime offers an absorbing account of a thousand years of Rochelais activity, through films, recreated interiors, objects, documents and clever wheezes such as a scale model of the fishing port around the 1970s showing the whole process from unloading trawlers at the quayside through gutting, washing, crating, auctioning, to re-loading aboard fishmongers’ lorries, re-enacted by dozens of little metal figures and their Dinky Toy vehicles. And it’s not all miniature. Moored beside the long row of yellow and red canopied sheds is the museum’s historic ship collection, all visitable: a stubby ocean-going tug, a
great butch diesel-gobbling trawler and a big meteorological survey ship, the France 1, which you can wander through the cabins and kitchens and workshops of, admiring the functional 1950s interior design, before having lunch in the sun at the upper deck café/restaurant.
La Rochelle’s museum stock deals with life below the surface of the sea as well as above it. The city’s family-run aquarium, is one of the biggest and most spectacular in Europe, and if you’re not an aquarium fan, don’t be deterred. The educational side of a walk through half a million litres of water divided into gigantic glass tank-theatres, some equipped with waves and tides, is undeniable. But from a frivolous aesthetetic point of view, the stunning array of fishy costume is even more striking, from dull bronze scale micro-mesh finishes smarter than any Porsche to Cartier-like sculpted silver plating and fluorescent oranges, mauves, whites and inky black silk on little tropical specimens.