Saint-Malo will have its maritime museum. This should see the light of day in 2028 inside its famous ramparts, the Breton city of Ille-et-Vilaine announced on Tuesday.
“After several months of study and in view of the intention of the museum and the cultural issues, the choice fell (…) on the National Maritime School of Saint-Malo”, located within the intra -muros which attracts millions of tourists each year, indicated the town hall.
A “major project that took a long time to complete”
“It’s a big project that took a long time to complete,” said Mayor Gilles Lurton during a press conference on Monday. According to municipal councilor Jacques Hardoin, the museum could welcome “120,000/130,000 visitors” per year.
Established by Colbert then rebuilt after the Second World War, the former hydrography school, today the École nationale supérieure maritime de Saint-Malo, “embodies an important part of Saint-Malo maritime history where many generations of students learned navigation,” according to the city. The former site of this school was vacated during the summer of 2023.
The building permit planned for the end of 2025
The launch of the architectural competition is scheduled for January 2024, the building permit for the end of 2025, “to lead to a forecast delivery date expected in 2028”. The museum’s Scientific and Cultural Project (PSC) must be the expression of “the strong and constitutive history of Saint-Malo” and “the issues relating to the sea today and tomorrow”.
The Saint-Malo collections bring together a collection of 13,000 objects evocative of the “maritime fact”, from the explorer Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) to Commander Charcot (1867-1936) or the fishermen or privateers who crisscrossed the seas from Newfoundland to Cape Horn. A new collection conservation space should be delivered at the end of 2024, in a commercial activity area of Saint-Malo.