Grenoble; Sunday, 04 September, 2022

I’d decided to use Sunday as my museum day to try and tick off several of the city’s free museums. First stop was the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation of Isère. This very moving museum tells the story of how the Second World War made it’s way to Grenoble, the impact on the city and the restrictions on peoples lives initially under Vichy France, then Italian Occupation and finally the much worse Nazi Occupation, during which the work of the resistance, but also the deportation of the city’s Jewish population reached a climax.

From the resistance museum it was a short walk down to the former bishops place next to the Cathedral. This has been turned into a museum which houses a strange mish-mash of artefacts from Roman mosaics and medieval church art to relatively modern art and artefacts about the city. In the basement of the palace are the remains of an early baptistry that you can also look around.

From the bishops palace I headed on down to the river, via the open-air sculptures in the park behind the Musée Grenoble, and across the Pont St-Laurent to the Porte St-Laurent, one of the city gateways and nearby the ancient church of St-Laurent. The Church is likely on the site of part of the Roman burial ground as it would originally have been across the river from the Roman town, but over time small chapels, a church and then a monastery were built up on the site.

The history of the site is explained through the archaeological digs that have taken place inside the now deconsecrated church, with the floor having being removed and the various stages of construction and building opened up to see, including the numerous burials over the ages and the ability to descend down into the crypt where remains of the earliest sanctuary are still in place.

From the Archaeological museum I headed down the road running alongside the river stopping at a very nice boulangerie to grab some lunch before climbing up several hundred steps and about a quarter of the way up the Bastille hill to reach the former convent of Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut, which is now the Musée dauphinois.

This museum tells the history of the historic Dauphiné region, of which Grenoble has always been the capital, showing how the people of the region lived in times gone past when it was a much more rural region, surviving on mountain farming. The museum also has exhibits on the start and development of winter snow tourism that the region helped to pioneer, as well as a large exhibition on the glove industry in the city, which was the main Industry of Grenoble for many years, with the city at one point being known as the glove capital of the world.

After taking in the fourth museum of the day I wandered a bit further down the riverside road to reach the Porte de France. This former city gate is now the city’s main war memorial, with the names of those lost in the battles of the First World War inscribed on the inside of the gate. Across the road from the gate is the Jardin des Dauphins which is a small garden built on the bottom slopes of the Bastille Hill.

I started to wander up through the park taking in the views as I went, slowly climbing up through initially park land, but very quickly these turned into the fortifications of the lower part of the Bastille Hill. It’s not very well sign posted but at some point you actually leave the Gardens and are just on one of the paths heading up to the Bastille.

Hiking up to the Bastille on a warm sunny day wasn’t something that I had originally been planning to do, but by the time I realised that I’d left the gardens I was already so far up that it made more sense to just slowly continue on walking up, albeit being passed quite regularly by locals running up the path!

After about an hour of climbing I finally made the top of the Bastille and very quickly located the drinking fountain so that I could top up the water bottles that I had thankfully thought to bring with me and that I had almost drunk dry on the way up. Given that I’d walked all the way up I did think about taking the cable car back down, but instead decided to descend back down the opposite side of the Bastille through the fortifications on the Eastern side of the hill, which in the end were mostly via steps – well over 1,000 – back down to the Porte St-Laurent. From the gate I headed back to my hotel to slather my knees with Voltarol and turn in for the night.