About Arènes d’Arles and the person writing it
I am Mathilde Roux. I was born in Arles and I live in the Roquette, the old boatmen’s quarter on the Rhône, ten minutes’ walk from the amphitheatre. I watched my first Cocarde d’Or from the upper tiers as a child. This site is my attempt to answer, properly and in one place, the questions I get asked about the arènes every year: can I get in, when, how, and is a tour worth it.
Who I am
I worked five summers as a licensed guide in Provence, walking groups through Arles, Nîmes, the Alpilles and the Camargue. Those summers taught me the rhythm of the monument: which hour the ticket desk queue builds, which days the whole town knows it is closed and the visitors do not, how long a family actually spends inside before the children want ice cream. I no longer guide. I write about this corner of Provence now, and I send friends to the Théâtre antique first and the arena second, because the theatre is empty at nine.
I do not work for any tour operator, for GetYourGuide or for the city. If I think a tour is the wrong choice for you, that is what the page will say. The private walk review says the value score is weak because it is; the day-trip reviews say the towns are self-guided because the reviewers keep saying so.
What this site is, and what it is not
An independent English-language guide to the Roman amphitheatre of Arles and to the six GetYourGuide tours that pass through the town. It is not the official site of the venue. Spectacle tickets for the ferias, the Cocarde d’Or and the concerts are sold by the events box office at arenes-arles.com, and monument tickets and the Arles passes are run by the Office de Tourisme d’Arles at arlestourisme.com. I sell neither. I explain how both work on the tickets page and the feria calendar, and I tell you plainly which days the monument is closed to sightseers.
The one idea behind every page is that the Arènes d’Arles lead two lives. By day it is a monument you walk into with a ticket, no tour required. On feria weekends and on spectacle days it is France’s oldest working bullring, and it shuts its doors to visitors, sometimes for four days at a stretch. Most disappointed visitors I have met over the years arrived on one of those days. So every page here answers the same two questions in the same order: can you get in on the day you are coming, and is a tour worth adding. The long version is in the complete guide.
On the bulls
People ask, so: I explain the difference between the corrida, in which the bull is killed, and the course camarguaise, in which nobody bleeds and the bull is the star, without telling you what to think about either. That page is corrida versus course camarguaise. What I will tell you is the dates, because they decide whether the gates are open.
Why there are no prices on this site
Because any figure I typed here would be out of date by the time you read it, and wrong in a different currency depending on where you are sitting. The tourist office changes its tariffs, operators change what they charge, and a stale number is worse than none. So I write what a ticket or a tour gets you in as much detail as I can, and leave the live figure to the booking widget and the ticket desk, where it is current. What I can say in words, I do: under-18s go in free, the passes are better value if you visit several monuments, and a private walk is priced for a group.
How this site is paid for
Through the GetYourGuide affiliate programme. If you book a tour after following a link from here, I earn a commission and you pay what you would have paid going direct. That is the whole business model, set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page. It does not decide what goes on these pages, and it cannot, because the honest advice for most readers is that you do not need a tour to see the arena at all.
Found something out of date, or something I have got wrong? Tell me and I will fix it.