Read the Review

Is it worth a look? What is it like? Well, here is my review of the visit to The Underground City at Naours. There is also the FREE eBook here.

Before I start, I should mention that there is no facility for wheelchairs at the Underground City. There are lots of steps, uneven ground and places where you have to stoop or turn sideways. Ok, back to the review.

The first thing that my friends and I noticed when we arrived after several hours in the car travelling from Essex England, was that they were closing in 10 minutes which would be 12:30 for a ninety minute lunch break. All of a sudden we were faced with the dilemma of finding something to occupy ourselves with for what seemed an awful long time, we were very fortunate that the toilets were outside in the car park and although there wasn’t anywhere to wash our hands, we were able to at last uncross our legs.

We decided to go for a drive round to pass the time and ended up finding a very interesting first world war Museum to walk round. After this we arrived back at the Underground City and this time found that they were open, the entrance to the complex is by way of a steep flight of steps from a large car park up into a small yard which leads into the café. When we arrived there we ordered some refreshments and then made enquiries as to accessing the Underground City .

The very nice lady took our entrance fee and told us that it was a guided tour and it started in half an hour (another half an hour wait). We were each given a seven page French to English translation of what the tour guide was going to say to us throughout the visit.

This written translation was appalling, filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar, understanding it was almost impossible. It referred several times to “The Map” which you assume will be at the back of the collection of pages that were individually placed inside plastic A4 wallets made for ring binders but, when you finish trawling through the waffle… NO MAP.

We thought that more would become apparent once the 45 minutes tour started. As promised on the dot, a very nice French lady arrived and summoned us all outside to the rear of the café. We walked across a short yard to another building which had written on the main door that NO CAMERAS were allowed in the tunnels.

The guide gave a short speech in French to the small group of mainly English people and then she opened the door and in we went, we were led down a long flight of stairs into almost pitch black… and there we were… under the ground with a camera you couldn’t use, a guide talking in French to a mainly English audience, and a guide book that didn’t make sense in any language which you couldn’t read because it was so dark.

Never mind I thought, stay positive, this is only the start of the tour. I was sure that it was going to get a lot more impressive as the rest of the forty five minutes ticked by. How wrong could I be. It was as dark or even darker as time went on, I tried to branch off a little way just to try and get at least one photo but the guide was behind me almost straight away telling me (in English) that the tour was this way.

As you can see elsewhere on this site, I did manage to stay at the back and get a few poor pictures using a camera with NO FLASH. After a short while we ended up in the museum part of the tour which is just before you arrive back into the café where we started. We were asked for the guide book leaflet thing back and then we left.

Although I haven’t painted a very interesting picture of this experience, I’m still glad I went. The place in it’s self with it’s extensive history is amazing. We didn’t feel that we were shown very much of the city as the tour was only forty five minutes long and the tunnels are supposed to cover some 2 kilometres.

Closing for ninety minutes is a bad idea, we visited on a week day in September, but then closing in the middle of any day can’t be good for the tourism business.

Not being able to come home with any photo’s is a real problem for me. People need to be able to take photo’s to look back on and to show their friends and family. What are they frightened of? Taking snapshots isn’t going to stop people visiting, photo’s are interesting but they are not the same as the experience of actually being there.

So, to sum up the place is still worth a visit, just make sure that you do it in conjunction with something else to make the journey worthwhile. Going all that way just to visit this place isn’t worth it while it is under the current management. For more info visit the official site on our links page.