The story of Musée océanographique de Monaco

Look up at the façade: it rises above the sheer cliff to a height of 85.04 metres over the sea. Building it took eleven years and 100,000 tons of stone from La Turbie.

Prince Albert I, Monaco's modernist reformer, inaugurated the museum in 1910 and invited the world's leading oceanographers of the day. Along the frieze, he had the names of twenty well-known research vessels inscribed.

On the first floor you can see the laboratory from L'Hirondelle, the first of his research yachts; observations made there led to the understanding of anaphylaxis, which earned Dr Charles Richet the Nobel Prize in 1913. Jacques-Yves Cousteau was director from 1957 to 1988. Down in the basement, the aquarium shows four thousand species of fish and over 200 families of invertebrates, with Mediterranean and tropical ecosystems. A curious footnote: in 1989 a marine biologist found a patch of the giant tropical seaweed Caulerpa taxifolia right beneath the museum's walls, and its origin is still disputed.