LANDING MUSEUM

Quality Tourism. Closed in January. Adults: €12.90. Vacation vouchers. Children welcome. Guided tour. Animations. Animals not allowed.

After 2 years of work, the new museum was unveiled on April 1, 2023

Arromanches is a town steeped in history, where the sweetness of life, emotion and the vestiges of the past are mixed together. Nestled between two cliffs on the Bessin coast in Normandy, Arromanches-les-Bains is a seaside resort where life is good. Located on the D-Day beaches, it was on this beach that, during the Battle of Normandy, immediately after D-Day, the Allies established the "Mulberry B" port, a temporary artificial harbor to allow the landing of heavy equipment, without waiting for the conquest of deep water ports such as those of Le Havre or Cherbourg. The British built huge floating reinforced concrete caissons, called "Phoenix", which, assembled side by side, formed a dike of floating pontoons that followed the tides and were connected to the land by real floating causeways. Today, some of the "Phoenix" caissons can still be seen in the open sea, remnants of a technical feat that allowed the landing of 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of equipment. Fascinating when you think about the context and the means of the time!

It is on the esplanade next to the artificial harbor that the D-Day Museum was built in the aftermath of the war, at the request of the D-Day Committee. As the first museum built to commemorate the Normandy Landing, it was inaugurated on June 5, 1954 by René Coty, President of the Republic at the time. A real event here!

And since then, the museum commemorates the Battle of Normandy and more particularly the construction of the artificial harbor "Mulberry B", of which one can see the remains of the large windows of the building.

Until its closure, the former Arromanches museum will have welcomed more than 20 million visitors! Designed for 30,000 visitors a year, it has been receiving 300,000 in recent times, hence the need to modernize it. Better conservation of the collections was also a major problem in the old building.

The new museum retains most of the elements present in the old one, including its famous model of the artificial harbor, built for the permanent exhibition in 1954! It explains the construction, routing and operation of the "Mulberry B", and is now completed with 3D mapping to visualize the port in operation, in its entirety.

The museum is divided into seven areas: after picking up an audioguide (available in ten languages as well as in LSF, audio-description, FALC and with a magnetic loop for the blind or visually impaired), count on a 1h30 visit.