The new South Station of Nice invitation to gourmet travel [Video gallery]

Gateway to the city as in the past, the South Station is a new urban place resolutely contemporary. An emblematic monument of the Popular District of the Liberation haloed by its famous market, the Gare du Sud has long combined its history with the past. Today, she is reborn, rejuvenated, offbeat and greedy. First gourmet market in France, it is in tune with the times and gives the tempo of a new lifestyle to the inventive, friendly and cultural Nice. Anti-mall mixing restoration, gastronomy, vintage and artistic events, this new popular hall is free and open to all. Animated permanently, the Station of the South will allow everyone to go to-and-fro in a musical and cultural atmosphere.

Like the Gare d'Orsay, its contemporary, now a must-see museum, the South Station of Nice is changing and becomes a must-see place of life.

HISTORY

Inaugurated in 1892, the railway station of the Southern Railway Company embraces the whole of Provence. On the doorstep of the City, the rail networks convey men, animals, products, scents, sounds and colors of the country of Nice across the Haute Provence, Dauphiné, Haut Var and the Durance basin. Closed a century later, in 1991, the Station almost disappeared, knew various projects, was partly protected then finally is masterfully rehabilitated by the architecture firm of Reichen and Robert.

A NEW NIÇOIS PLACE OF LIFE

When Olivier Durand, President and CEO of Urban Renaissance takes over the new destiny of the Gare du Sud, he chooses to reconnect with the spirit of the place to better reinvent it. His challenge: to give back to Niçois the way of this old monumental railway station, to make discover it widely outside the borders by reactivating his DNA: to make resound the South around the taste papillas by inviting about thirty restaurateurs of Nice to settle in the South station.

THE IDEA:

Create a large contemporary market where one comes to eat, bargain-hunt, drink, listen to music and discover new talents. It is a question of hoisting the station of the south of Nice at the height of the European places known for their attractiveness and originality as well on the local as tourist level, like the Portobello flea market in London. His dream: under the big hall, to see, hear, smell, taste, touch the South by all the senses. Reinventing the movement and the sounds, finding under the vault the consecrated products, inviting to the discovery and the marriage of new flavors, to hail new figures and always to celebrate the sharing of a dish or a wine.