Cemeteries and memorials to visit Charente-Maritime

In the city-arsenal of Rochefort, commissioned in the ^17th century by Louis XIV, still floats a perfume of exoticism proper to the places where the great expeditions left. The "most beautiful arsenal of the Ponant", built in 1666 in a loop of the Charente. For three centuries, this open-air factory built 550 ships. A tradition that continues with the Hermione, a replica of the Frégate de la Liberté (1779) used by the Marquis de La Fayette to support the American War of Independence... After leading other military campaigns, the Hermione was wrecked in 1793 off the coast of Le Croisic. As we enter the new century, Rochefort has lived for nearly 20 years at the rhythm of the reconstruction of the famous frigate. This adventure began in 1997, at the initiative of the Hermione-Lafayette Association, which wanted to recover an important element of Rochefort's maritime heritage. In 2015, the Hermione began its maiden voyage to the United States in the footsteps of La Fayette. In 2016, the frigate sailed to Saint-Malo and Brest, then to the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Back in the port where she was born in 2019, she is now open to visitors in the formidable Arsenal des mers. You can practice accro-mât. A really unusual activity! In this marine adventure park, you go from mast to mast, climb the ropes and dominate the Charente at a height of 30 m. If the Hermione is not in Rochefort at the moment, due to repair work on her hull, there is good hope to see the frigate again in 2025.

The museum occupies the buildings of the former naval medical and surgical school of the Hôpital de la Marine. Created in 1722 by Jean Cochon-Dupuy, the king's physician, it was the first military medical school in Europe, and also the oldest naval medical school in the world. The superb library, created in 1818, houses 25,000 books: some are old, others surprising and often exotic (travel accounts, notes on the peoples observed). If you visit the museum between May 15 and September 20, this year you will discover the workshop of the platypus, an animal that aroused many reactions and doubts in the scientific community when it first arrived in Europe!