Musée du marbre et Muséum du Salut (Marble and Local History)

The Marble Museum located in the former Salut Baths exhibits an historic gallery of renovated marble baths and showers. The museum exists thanks to the efforts of Jacques Dubarry de Lassale, a passionate collector who put together a superb collection of European marbles, 320 examples amongst which a hundred or so can be found in the Pyrenean quarries (Spanish Basque Country and the Languedoc).

Both the Spanish and the French slopes of the Pyrenees mountain chain seem to have been specially designed to yield a vast and varied treasure trove for the marble-loving collector as this region of France is particularly rich in the stone. From the Mediterranean coast to the Atlantic ocean, there is an uninterrupted succession of open quarries perched high on the mountain summits and deep in the many valleys that descend towards the Garonne plain. M.CALVI 1960

The Museum’s collections, Musée de France includes a giant model of Haute Bigorre and a place where visitors can observe the bat roost in the rafters of the building that is linked to an infra-red camera.