Scifi Scoop Editors
The underwater city is located several dozen meters deep and has become a destination for divers
It’s not a very well-known anecdote, but 58 years ago a French filmmaker named Sylver Néjad Atzamba wanted to make a musical film called L’Enfant et la Sirene (The Boy and the Mermaid) and, in order to give it greater realism, they built an underwater miniature city that they never got to use. This was back in 1965 and the technological advances that have given us great visual experiences “under water” like the recent Avatar: The Way of Water or the live-action The Little Mermaid were absolutely unimaginable.
However, not without a lot of enthusiasm and great ambition, the team built a city 30 meters deep on the French Riviera with a main square, a church, an amphitheater and various businesses common in any city, such as a hair salon, a supermarket and even a law firm.
The construction of the small underwater city took two years, but when the time came to shoot the musical, the team realized the complexities of filming underwater and the unexpected film set was abandoned forever. After that, Sylver Néjad Atzamba’s team set out to finish the work in an animation studio, but ultimately the project was completely abandoned.
The underwater city is located several dozen meters deep off the coast of Cape Antibes on the French Côte d’Azur, near the La Fourmigue Lighthouse, and the underwater buildings, some up to one meter high, completely neglected, were completely deteriorated until in 2007 the town of Vallauris Golfe-Juan decided to carry out a restoration project that is now a wonderful attraction for divers.
However, information about the abandoned underwater village is very limited, although you can find countless photographs on the internet and various tourist information mentioning La Fourmigue, “famous for its sunken village,” as one of the most recommended diving sites and with companies like Diamond Diving listing it among some of its possible diving scenarios.
