La Bastille

The Bastille is the name of a nineteenth-century 476 meters high fortress overlooking the city of Grenoble. Accessible by the first urban cable car in Europe, the Bastille is the first tourist site of the Isere with 600,000 visitors each year and one of the favorite walks of the Grenoblois. Its beautiful panorama extends over the Alps, the Mont Blanc and the city of Grenoble.  Visit this fortified complex that has never been attacked since its construction. Classified in the supplementary inventory of historical monuments, the Bastille has also given its name to the hill on which the military fort is perched at the border between France and the Piedmont. Fortified by the end of the Middle Ages, the mountain of the Bastille offers the largest military architecture of the nineteenth century. The Bastille is a powerful limestone rock turned into a fortress over the centuries with its keep, its citadel, its moat and glacis at the mountain side. At the side of the city, the Bastille has haswalls, stairs and bunkers on nearly 300 vertical meters. For the more athletic, it can also be reached on foot by trails that lead to the site of the « plateau de la Bastille ».