| Summary: | Montpellier is one of France’s most ‘medical’ cities and like many other French cities had a ‘general hospital’, a sort of prison-hospital created by Louis XIV. In this institution, designed to contain and Christianise the poor, the chapel dedicated to Saint Charles played a particularly important rôle. The hospital evolved gradually during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and after being a place of imprisonment and control of the poor, it gradually opened up to proper medicine. In a state of disrepair, the institution was progressively replaced by the new Saint-Charles clinics opened at the end of the 1930s. For a while these clinics were at the forefront of medicine and hospital architecture, before being supplanted in turn by the new hospital centres built at the periphery of the city in the 1970s. Confronted with the disrepair of these hospital buildings (generally called the ‘îlot Saint-Charles’) the site, close to the historic centre of the city, presents important heritage values but also important real estate ones. During the years after 2000, the city launched an ambitious programme for the rehabilitation of the site, now in its second phase. The îlot Saint-Charles is already better known and commencing its cultural and heritage renaissance.
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