If you have already seen the Colosseum, the question you ask yourself in front of the Arena of Nîmes is a fair one: is it worth going into a second Roman amphitheatre, and a smaller one at that?
The two monuments tell opposite stories. The Colosseum is bigger, but it suffered far more extensive stripping: for centuries it served as a quarry, and what you see is a building that has lost a large part of its original structure. The amphitheatre of Nîmes is smaller, but it is the best preserved Roman amphitheatre, and the reason is almost comic: the people of Nîmes never stripped it, because they were living inside it.
The result is that here you can walk through the covered galleries, climb the original stairs and reach the tiers along the same route the spectators took in the second century. In Rome that is no longer possible.
Let’s start with what you see as soon as you arrive.
A building you can read from the outside
The Arena stands in the heart of the city, and the first thing that strikes you is that the facade survives to its full height, right up to the cornice.
The measurements: 133 metres by 101, with the top cornice reaching 21 metres and an oval floor of 68 metres by 38. The facade has two storeys of sixty arches each, one hundred and twenty in all, separated by columns engaged in the wall. It was built around 100 AD, some twenty years after the Colosseum, and could hold twenty-four thousand spectators.
But the most interesting things to look at are not the arches: they are the blocks set above the columns.
Raise your eyes to the second storey and notice the blocks jutting out of the wall like brackets. Each one is pierced: into those holes went the poles that held the taut ropes of the velum, the awning that shaded the tiers. At the Colosseum they survive only on the part of the attic still standing; here they run right around the perimeter, and it was seeing them in a row that made me understand how that covering was held up.
The bulls on the pediment and the gladiators on the parapet
The Arena’s carved decoration has survived, and it is the kind of detail that can escape you if you walk around distracted. The main entrance has a triangular pediment with two bull protomes, that is, depictions of the front part of the animal, head and chest, emerging from the stone. This was the door reserved for magistrates and for the editor, the notable who organised the games and paid for them out of his own pocket. That a bull should have presided over the entrance two thousand years ago, in a city with this bullfighting tradition, does not go unnoticed.
Then there are two carvings almost nobody looks for, on the side facing the Palais de Justice: on the first-floor parapet you can make out two gladiators in mid-combat, and a little further along the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, Rome’s signature on a building a thousand kilometres from Rome.
A curious detail: in a cross-shaped underground chamber beneath the floor, two slabs are set into the wall bearing the inscription T. CRISPIVS REBVRRVS FECIT, «the work of Titus Crispius Reburrus». It is the only proper name preserved on the building, and the paradox lies exactly there: we can read the name, but we do not know what role Titus Crispius Reburrus had. He may have been the architect, he may have been the man who funded the underground works.
The galleries, the part that no longer exists elsewhere
Here is the real reason the Arena is worth the price of admission even for someone who has already seen other amphitheatres.
Behind the arches run covered annular galleries, with their barrel vaults intact and a floor of stone slabs. They were not service corridors: they were the system for channelling the spectators. You entered through one of the sixty arches, followed the gallery to your sector, then climbed towards the cavea. Walking inside them today, with the light coming in in shafts from the side openings, is what stayed with me most: you are inside the machine, not in front of it.
And how did you reach the tiers? Through the vomitoria, the openings that led from the galleries and the internal stairs to the various sectors of the cavea: as you climb, the stone arch frames the sky just before you emerge onto the seating. The effect is designed, not accidental: the whole oval of the arena appears in front of you all at once. The system existed to let twenty-four thousand spectators in and out without congestion and without mixing the sectors, because the seat you were assigned depended on your social status.
What actually happened, hour by hour
A day of games followed a fairly codified sequence, and knowing it changes the way you look at the arena floor.
The morning was given over to the venationes, the hunts. Lions and elephants did not reach Nîmes as they did Rome: the animals were local ones, deer and wild boar caught in the garrigue. At midday came the public executions of the condemned. The afternoon was the time of the munera, the gladiatorial combats. And here it is worth dismantling two opposite clichés: among the gladiators there were slaves, prisoners of war and condemned men, but also freedmen and free men who chose to fight, the auctorati, who bound themselves for a set period in exchange for a fee.
Nîmes had its own gladiator school, and the visitor route reconstructs its changing room, pointing to the Cavillargues medallion, one of the most important archaeological records of gladiatorial combat, displayed in the museum across the road.
Two thousand years in which it was never a ruin
In the early fifth century, between the imperial bans (the most often cited is the one of 404) and the slow fading of the games, the amphitheatre lost its original function. It was not abandoned, though, but reused without a break: that is why it is still standing.
From the sixth century the Visigoths turned it into a fortress, the castrum arenarum, walling up the arches to make a defensive curtain. Then the fortress slowly became a neighbourhood: inside the amphitheatre a piece of city grew up with about two hundred and fifty houses, a school and two churches, inhabited well into the nineteenth century.
Here is the paradox. While in Rome the Colosseum was being stripped of its metal fittings and used as a travertine quarry, in Nîmes those same stones were left alone because they were somebody’s house walls. Continuous reuse preserved what abandonment would have destroyed: the arena floor, most of the tiers, the galleries and every single arch.
Clearance came with an imperial decree of 1809, and by 1812 the interior had been completely freed of the buildings occupying it.
The Arena today: ferias, concerts and a long building site
The Arena is not only an archaeological monument: it is also a space still in use, and that sets it apart from many other Roman amphitheatres.
In the nineteenth century it went back to hosting shows and became a plaza de toros. Still today, during the two ferias (the Feria de Pentecôte in spring and the Feria des Vendanges in September, the grape harvest one), the Arena hosts bullfights and courses camarguaises, in which the raseteurs snatch a rosette from the bull’s horns without killing it. If bullfighting makes you uncomfortable, bear it in mind when choosing your dates: those are also the days when the monument closes to visitors. In summer the Festival de Nîmes brings international artists into the Roman cavea, with acoustics very different from those of a modern arena hall.
Since 2009 a restoration project has been under way, planned to run until 2034, bay by bay. It means that part of the facade is almost always covered in scaffolding: it does not spoil the visit, but if you were hoping to photograph the whole amphitheatre unobstructed, bear it in mind.
Practical information
Data checked on 7 August 2026 on the official site arenes-nimes.com. Prices, opening hours and above all closures for events change often: check again before you travel.
Tickets. A ticket for the Arena alone costs 11 euros. The reduced rate is 9 euros, the youth rate 5.50 and the family pass 23; admission is free under 7. The 3 Monuments Pass, which also covers the Maison Carrée and the Tour Magne, costs 14.50 euros and is the obvious choice: the two extra admissions, bought separately, would cost 10.50 euros. The Pass Romanité at 20.50 euros also includes the Musée de la Romanité, is valid for three days and gives priority access to the museum and the Arena.
Opening hours. The Arena opens seven days a week all year round. In July and August it opens from 8.00 to 21.00; in June and September from 9.00 to 19.00; in April and May from 9.00 to 18.30; in March and October from 9.00 to 18.00; from November to February from 9.30 to 17.00. Last admission is one hour before closing, half an hour if you go in without the audio guide.
The thing you really should check. On days with a concert, a bullfight or a ceremony the amphitheatre closes early or does not open at all, and the calendar of exceptional closures is published on the official page: that is what I would most recommend checking before your visit. As I write, two pages on the same official site give different dates for one October closure, so trust the calendar and not a date copied from somewhere else.
Free admission. Admission is free for children under 7, for people with disabilities and one companion, for residents of Nîmes, for journalists and for accredited tour guides (guides-conférenciers). Under-18s must be accompanied by an adult.
Getting there. The train is the easiest option: Nîmes Centre station is a five-minute walk away, and there are direct TGVs from Paris. Take care not to confuse it with the Nîmes Pont-du-Gard TGV station, which is about twenty minutes away by car. If you drive, leave the A9 or the A54 and use the paid underground car park on boulevard de Bruxelles.
How long to allow. An hour and a half with the audio guide, just under an hour without. In the hot months go early: in July and August it opens at eight, and there is no shade on the tiers.
If you want to fit the amphitheatre into an itinerary devoted to Roman Nîmes, you can book entry to the Arena with the Nîmes audio guide. If all you want is to go in, the official ticket at the desk costs less and the queue is rarely long.
What to see nearby
One of the great advantages of Nîmes is that its main Roman monuments are a few minutes’ walk from one another, which is why the city is worth a full day rather than a stop: the complete itinerary is in what to see in Nîmes.
The Maison Carrée is five minutes away: a temple of 4 AD dedicated to Augustus’s two grandsons, both of whom died before they could succeed him, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2023 (the Arena, incidentally, is not). The Tour Magne, at the top of the Jardins de la Fontaine, is what remains of the tallest tower of the Augustan walls: you can climb it, and from up there the city and the garrigue fit into the same frame. The Musée de la Romanité, opposite the Arena, holds finds from the amphitheatre and from other Roman sites in the city. Half an hour away by car is the Pont du Gard, the bridge of the Roman aqueduct that brought water right here.
If you are building a longer itinerary in the south, Carcassonne is two hours away: I have written about it in what to see in Carcassonne. The Arena of Nîmes and the Cité of Carcassonne tell two very different stories of surviving one’s own time. Nîmes also remains a natural stop for anyone thinking about what to see in France beyond Paris by train.
One last piece of advice. Before you go in, walk all the way round the outside: it takes ten minutes and it is the only way to see the gladiators on the parapet, the she-wolf and the bulls on the pediment, none of which are visible from inside. And if you feel like carrying on through Roman France, the Roman Museum of Lyon is the other stop worth the visit.
