How long does a visit to the Arènes d’Arles take?

Inside the arena: where the minutes go

The visit has a fixed shape. You buy or show your ticket under the arches, walk the ground-level gallery that runs the whole ellipse, step out onto the arena floor, climb to the tiers, and, if your knees allow, take the stairs up the tower for the view over the roofs to the Rhône. The gallery and the floor take twenty minutes if you stop to read. The tiers take as long as you want to sit; there are about 34 rows and the upper ones are where the building makes sense, because you see the full 136 by 107 m oval and the two tiers of 60 arches at once.

The tower is the variable. It is stairs only, narrow, and worth it; count fifteen minutes up, down and looking. The free web audio guide adds another quarter of an hour if you listen to all of it. The underground galleries are only open on guided visits that need booking, so they do not figure in a normal visit at all.

A half day: theatre, arena, Saint-Trophime

This is the plan I give friends, and the order matters. Start at the Théâtre antique at nine, when it opens and is empty. It was built under Augustus around 12 BC, holds two lonely columns the town calls les deux veuves, and takes half an hour. Walk the 200 m to the arena for about ten, before the coaches, and give it an hour. From there it is ten minutes downhill to place de la République: the Saint-Trophime portal is free to look at from the square, the cloister behind it is ticketed and takes half an hour. You are done by 12:30, and if it is Saturday the market on boulevard des Lices runs until 12:45.

The combined arena-and-theatre ticket covers the first two stops; the Pass Liberté covers all three plus one museum, and is the better buy for this plan. The differences are set out on the tickets page.

A full day

After lunch, the Alyscamps: the Roman necropolis that Van Gogh and Gauguin painted side by side in the autumn of 1888, a fifteen-minute walk south-east of the arena and quiet even in August. Allow 45 minutes. Then the Musée départemental Arles antique on the edge of town, where the Roman barge pulled out of the Rhône sits in one hall and the bust said to be Caesar, found in the river in 2007, sits in another. That is a two-hour museum if you like Roman things and one hour if you do not.

If you would rather have Van Gogh than Romans in the afternoon, walk the café on place du Forum, the Espace Van Gogh courtyard and the Fondation, then the LUMA tower at the Parc des Ateliers. The walking order for the whole town is on what to see in Arles.

What to skip

The cryptoportiques, if you are short of time or dislike damp underground galleries; they are interesting and they are also dark, cold and empty of anything to look at beyond the vaulting. Constantine’s baths are a ten-minute stop, not a destination. And skip the arena itself between noon and three in July and August; the tiers are bare stone in full sun, and the same building at nine or at six is a different place.

When a tour changes the arithmetic

None of the tours sold through this site goes inside the arena, and none includes the ticket, so a tour is added time, not replaced time. The express walk is 60 minutes and sees the monument from outside. The private walk is two hours and does the same, in five languages, with a guide who scores 5.0 in the reviews; it is priced for a group, so it makes sense for four or more. The three day trips from Aix, Marseille and Avignon give you between 75 minutes and an hour and a half in Arles, which is enough to go in if you head straight for the arena and skip the café. How each one spends its time in town is compared on the day tours page.

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