Marseille and the sea: A portrait of the millennia-old port city that is hosting Olympic sailing

MARSEILLE, France (AP) — Her black headscarf flying up, a teen jumped into the sparkling Mediterranean from a concrete pier at a city marina, then scrambled back to shore and onto a giant paddle board for a quick tour with a dozen excited comrades.

They were bused in for a swimming camp from a social services center in the mostly Muslim, North African-origin neighborhoods that ring Marseille, which is hosting the 2024 Olympicsailing competition at the opposite end of its spectacular, monument-fringed bay.

The millennia-old port is a crossroads of cultures and faiths, where the sea is ever present but not equally accessible, and the beauty and cosmopolitan flair rub shoulders with enclaves of poverty and exclusion even more intimately than in the rest of France.

“There are kids who see the sea from home, but have never come,” said Mathias Sintes, a supervisor at the Corbière marina for the Grand Bleu Association, which has held camps for about 3,000 marginalized children — 50% of whom, he estimates, didn’t know how to swim. “The first goal is to teach them to save themselves.”

Brahim Timricht, who grew up in the northern neighborhoods known as the “quartiers nord,“ founded the association more than two decades ago to bring children to enjoy the sea that shimmers below their often-dilapidated high-rises on the rocky cliffs.

Then he realized that many weren’t learning basic swimming in school — a requirement for elementary students in France — and figured he could take advantage of the warm summer months to introduce them to that skill.

“Then the mothers told me they still wouldn’t go to the beach, because they didn’t know how to swim and were afraid, so we started programs with them,” Timricht said as dozens of children happily splashed under the hot July sun a few days before the opening of the Olympic sailing competition.

The lack of pools for school programs is a sign of “social and economic segregation,” said Jean Cugier, who teaches physical education in a high school in the quartiers nord and belongs to the national union of PE teachers.

Over the past academic year, he’s been taking 30 sixth-graders 45 minutes by bus to a pool where two lanes were reserved for them — an unsustainable model, he said, that he’s hoping to modify with pool-based summer camps.

While the city has discussed using the Olympic marina after the Games — as Paris plans to do with an Olympic pool — the sea is too chilly to swim in during most of the school year. So the only concrete answer to the pool shortage is building more infrastructure, Cugier believes.

Another issue complicating swimming education, according to the Ministry of Education, has been the medical certificates that parents bring to excuse children from class. Officials say these are often fake and driven by the desire of some conservative Muslim families not to have boys and girls together at a pool.

Pools have become a flashpoint in France’s struggle over its unique approach to “laïcité” — loosely translated as “secularism” and strictly regulating the role of religion in the public space, including schools and even the Olympics.

But sports are also a way out of the margins. One of France's soccer greats, Zinedine Zidane, who carried the Olympic torch in the Paris opening ceremony, was born in the most notorious of Marseille's quartiers nord. And soccer remains the unifying passion of Marseille's residents, who routinely flock to cheer home team Olympique de Marseille at the Vélodrome stadium — one of the venues for Olympic soccer matches.

For the boys and girls at the Corbière marina, the overall seaside experience has been a chance to meet new people from outside their neighborhood.

“They don’t want to leave,” said one of the group leaders, Sephora Saïd, on the camp’s last day. She had worn a hijab during the outing, including while paddle-boarding.

The sea as an entry and a meeting point is engrained in the very DNA of Marseille. Founded by Greek colonists 2,600 years ago as a trading post, it is France’s oldest city, and its second largest.

“Before it’s a city, Marseille is a port,” said Fabrice Denise, director of the Museum of Marseille History, built next to the Greek archeological site in what is still the city’s center. “If you want to understand all that’s extraordinary about it, including the realities of cosmopolitanism, you need to understand its multi-century history as a port.”

Today’s port, the Mediterranean’s third largest in cargo tonnage, includes everything from refineries to a busy cruise ship area and extends along nearly 40 kilometers (25 miles). But it all started in a small inlet that is today’s top tourist attraction, the Vieux Port.

Large boats built of wood and caulked with cotton and fiber carried transforming cargos like grapevines, Denise said. The trade expanded north along the Rhone River in what is now one of France’s most celebrated wine-producing regions.

At the end of the harbor, a small boatyard still restores a handful of boats built in the old way. They were used for fishing until a few decades ago but now are too expensive to maintain for utilitarian purposes.

Not far away are the forts that King Louis XIV added in the 17th century to protect the port and the military arsenal he established. The small city became a metropolis.

Religious diversity arrived by sea too — Christians in reality and in myth, one of the most popular ones being that Mary Magdalen herself sailed to Marseille, which is commemorated with a large boat procession each year.

Centuries later, and increasingly since decolonization, Muslims from North Africa flocked to Marseille’s shores. Of the city’s 870,000 residents, some 300,000 trace their roots to Algeria alone.

In the narrow streets uphill from the Vieux Port, Arabic rings from market stalls, cafés and couscous restaurants — the second-most spoken language in the city. Marseille’s French itself is unique, incorporating not only a distinctive accent but words from the countryside’s Provençal language, said Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a linguist and professor at the University of Aix-Marseille. He is co-author of the French-language book “Marseille for Dummies.”

On its cover, as on the background of most photos including those of the Olympic regattas, stands the hilltop black-and-white-striped 19th century basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde, topped by a nearly 10-meter (33-foot) gold-covered statue of the Virgin Mary looking out to sea. It’s known as “la Bonne Mère” — the good mother.

“The Bonne Mère, it’s almost a pagan symbol,” quipped Gasquet-Cyrus, who says he i an atheist but still goes to visit. “She’s the protector of the city.”

The church welcomes around 2.5 million visitors a year, many for its daily Masses and more on its wide terrace. Its 360-degree views encompass the new and old ports, the villa-studded neighborhoods where the Olympic marina is nestled as well as the blocky towers of the quartiers nord.

“You can see Marseille, and the sea, and the horizon, all under her benevolent gaze,” said the basilica’s rector, the Rev. Olivier Spinosa. “It’s easier to see beauty from up high, and it invites us to work on beautiful things when we’re down below.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

A child attends a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

FILE - Competitors from Norway, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and the U.S. maneuver through the water during the women's windsurfing race at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Monday, July 29, 2024, in Marseille, France. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

FILE - Sunbathers enjoy the sunset at the entrance to Marseille's Old Port in southern France, Tuesday, May 26, 2020 as France gradually lifts its COVID-19 lockdown. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

FILE - Women sit on a bench in Marseille, southern France, Friday, June 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

FILE - People enjoy a coffee on a balcony in the Old Port of Marseille in southern France, Tuesday, May 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

FILE - Fireworks go off as the Belem, the three-masted sailing ship bringing the Olympic flame from Greece, enters the Old Port in Marseille, southern France, Wednesday, May 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)

Children attend a swimming camp organized by the Grand Bleu Association which facilitates access to the sea for marginalized children in Marseille, France, Friday, July 26, 2024. Marseille, a millennia-old port, is a crossroads of cultures and faiths, where the sea is ever present but not equally accessible, and the beauty and cosmopolitan flair rub shoulders with enclaves of poverty and exclusion even more intimately than in the rest of France. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Nobel memorial prize in economics was awarded Monday to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for research that explains why societies with poor rule of law and exploitative institutions do not generate sustainable growth.

The three economists “have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm.

Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Robinson conducts his research at the University of Chicago.

“Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said.

He said their research has provided "a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.”

Reached by the academy in Athens, Greece, where he is due to speak at a conference, the Turkish-born Acemoglu, 57, said he was surprised and shocked by the award.

“You never expect something like this," he said.

Acemoglu said the research honored by the prize underscores the value of democratic institutions.

“I think broadly speaking the work that we have done favors democracy,” he said in a telephone call with the Nobel committee and reporters in Stockholm.

But he added that “democracy is not a panacea. Introducing democracy is very hard. When you introduce elections, that sometimes creates conflict.”

Asked about how economic growth in countries like China fits into the theories, Acemoglu said that "my perspective is generally that these authoritarian regimes, for a variety of reasons, are going to have a harder time ... in achieving ... long-term sustainable innovation outcomes.”

Acemoglu and Robinson wrote the 2012 bestseller “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,’’ which argued that manmade problems were responsible for keeping countries poor.

In their work, the winners looked, for instance, at the city of Nogales, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border.

Despite sharing the same geography, climate, many of the same ancestors and a common culture, life is very different on either side of the border. In Nogales, Arizona, to the north, residents are relatively well-off and live long lives; most children graduate from high school. To the south, in Mexico’s Nogales, Sonora, “residents here are in general considerably poorer. ... Organized crime makes starting and running companies risky. Corrupt politicians are difficult to remove," the Nobel committee wrote.

The difference, the economists found, is a U.S. system that protects property rights and gives citizens a say in their government.

Acemoglu expressed worry Monday that democratic institutions in the United States and Europe were losing support from the population. “Democracies particularly underperform when the population thinks they underdeliver," he said. “This is a time when democracies are going through a rough patch. … It is, in some sense, quite crucial that they reclaim the high ground of better governance."

The economists also studied the institutional changes that European powers such as Britain and Spain put in place when they colonized much of the world starting in the 1600s. They brought different policies to different places, giving later researchers a “natural experiment" to analyze.

Colonies that were sparsely populated offered less resistance to foreign rule and therefore attracted more settlers. In those places, colonial governments tended to establish more inclusive economic institutions that “incentivized settlers to work hard and invest in their new homeland. In turn, this led to demands for political rights that gave them a share of profits,” according to the Nobel committee.

In more densely populated places that attracted fewer settlers, the colonial regimes limited political rights and set up institutions that focused on “benefiting a local elite at the expense of the wider population ... Paradoxically, this means that the parts of the colonized world that were relatively the most prosperous around 500 years ago are now those that are relatively poor.” India’s industrial production, for example, exceeded the American colonies’ in the 18th century.

The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

Though Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

Journalists listen when Jan Teorell of the Nobel assembly announces the Nobel memorial prize in economics winners during a press meeting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday Oct. 14, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

Academy of Sciences permanent secretary Hans Ellegren, center, Jakob Svensson, left, and Jan Teorell, of the Nobel assembly announce the Nobel memorial prize in economics winners, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson during a press meeting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday Oct. 14, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

Academy of Sciences permanent secretary Hans Ellegren, center, Jakob Svensson, left, and Jan Teorell, of the Nobel assembly announce the Nobel memorial prize in economics winners, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson during a press meeting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday Oct. 14, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

FILE - Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology smiles in this image taken on June 22, 2019 in Kiel, Germany, as he and Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson won the Nobel prize in economics for research into reasons why some countries succeed and others fail. (Frank Molter, dpa via AP, File)

The Nobel memorial prize in economics awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson, seen on screen, during a press meeting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday Oct. 14, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

Academy of Sciences permanent secretary Hans Ellegren, center, Jakob Svensson, left, and Jan Teorell, of the Nobel assembly announce the Nobel memorial prize in economics winners, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson, seen on screen, during a press meeting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday Oct. 14, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

The Nobel economics prize is being announced in Sweden

The Nobel economics prize is being announced in Sweden

FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)