The story of this place
Built on a tiny island off Marseille in 1524 on the orders of Francis I to defend the coast, the Château d'If soon became a notorious state prison. Its isolation made escape seem impossible, and it held Protestants, political prisoners and revolutionaries in grim cells for centuries. Yet its true fame is fictional: Alexandre Dumas set the harrowing imprisonment of Edmond Dantès here in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), and visitors still ask to see the (invented) cells of Dantès and the Abbé Faria. Decommissioned as a prison and opened to the public in 1890, the fortress broods on its rock, ringed by the Mediterranean, exactly as Dumas's readers imagine it.