A timeless parenthesis, a moment of disconnection to listen to the surrounding nature. The Promenade Museum from the top of its tuff peak offers one of the most beautiful views of Digne les Bains. Museum Interpretation CenterUNESCO Geopark of Haute Provence, it offers visitors a multiple journey between geological times, artistic discoveries and contemplation of nature.
Ramparts with a view!
Digne-les-Bains from the house of the ramparts.
A path to connect the entrance to the site and the house of the ramparts
The Promenade Museum Park
From the reception, several paths with varied atmospheres lead to the house of the ramparts.
The water trail
Going up the water and winding under the trees, refreshing, it is punctuated with artistic installations and invites you to a meditative discovery of the site. It comes as close as possible to the Grande Cascade. Internationally renowned artists came at the invitation of the CAIRN art center: Andy Goldsworthy, Joan Fontcuberta, Paul-Armand Gette, Catherine Marcogliese, Sylvie Bussières have imagined works linked to this magical place. Most of them were produced during artist residencies. These facilities will offer you an original approach to discovering the park.
The Saint Benedict spring
The wooded park of the Promenade Museum is crisscrossed by streams and waterfalls from the Saint-Benoît source. This source flows continuously in summer and winter. It releases on average thirteen liters of water per second, or more than 400 million liters of water per year. Its temperature, which fluctuates between 11 and 13°C, provides a much appreciated freshness in summer. Its health monitoring and quality allow it to supply the premises of the Promenade Museum with drinking water.
The source feeding area occupies a few square kilometers northwest of the property. The water emerges thanks to a fault.
The ramparts path
This path climbs the old ramparts (13th century). It allows you to observe traces of tuff mining and offers a clear view of the mountainous setting of the town of Digne-les-Bains and the Bléone valley.
It is on this path, at the bottom of the waterfall that you can, if you are lucky, see a mermaid! A hydropithecus more precisely from the imagination of the Catalan artist, Joan Fontcuberta.
TUF then! Zoom on the big waterfall
It took several hundred years for the mass of tuff which forms the “body” of the great waterfall to develop.
To live in this place, man one day captured the Saint-Benoît spring and directed the flow of water to a point: the limestone was then deposited, thus accumulating the tuff.
The tuff deposited at Saint-Benoît was used in the past as construction material on site to build the ramparts and for the bell tower of the Saint-Jérôme de Digne cathedral for example.
The Cairns Trail
Andy Goldsworthy created this trail in 1998. This British artist is one of the main representatives of Land Art: a movement where the artist invests nature and landscapes to create sometimes ephemeral work from materials collected in nature.
The Cairns Trail takes its name from the five “water cairns”. From top to bottom, the first is dry; in the next three, we hear the water without seeing it; it springs from the last to join the natural environment.
The water circulates inside the sculptures, like a poetic metaphor of the Saint-Benoît spring, at once underground, invisible and gushing...
This path is recommended for going down from the Maison des Ramparts to the reception.
Two thematic gardens to discover in the park
The Japanese garden
This garden was created in honor of the town of Kamaishi in Japan, twinned with Digne les Bains since 1994. The Japanese had a cast made of the famous ammonite slab which they installed in the town museum.
The Kamaishi garden symbolizes the journey through life. To grasp its full meaning, you have to explore it from the bottom up. Along the route, the blooms are spread out in time and space, so that each season corresponds to the ages of life. When we cross the bridge, we enter the world of spirits...
The butterfly garden
Thanks to the water from the Saint-Benoît spring and a specific environment, in a climate that is both Mediterranean and mountainous, the Museum-Promenade park is a mecca of biodiversity. To create an oasis suitable for the feeding and reproduction of Lepidoptera, the plants in the butterfly garden have been carefully selected. From April to September, more than a hundred species of native butterflies can be observed in the wild.
A museum space
The House of Ramparts
A large part of the promenade museum's collections are dedicated to the last 300 million years of Earth's history through hundreds of fossils.
The complete casting of an ichthyosaur skeleton and its reconstruction, life-size and in 3D, recalls the presence of predators and the intense life that existed in the seas of the Secondary Era (or Mesozoic).
Aquariums revive the memory of the sea. Temporary exhibitions enliven the museum and the global network of UNESCO Geoparks is in the spotlight.
Unrolled ammonites and geological imagination
A unique regional collection of unfolded ammonites which lived in the seas of our region in the Cretaceous between -135 and -94 million years ago rubs shoulders with the works of the painter Georges Autard who designed an artistic darkness to mix his creations with paleontological pieces exceptional.
A dedicated space
The CAIRN art center
Le CAIRN art center is a creative laboratory connecting us to the specificities of the territory. An extension of the contemporary art collections of the Gassendi Museum, its exhibition space offers works produced by artists in residence at the Musée-Promenade.
