Observatoire Oceanologique de Villefranche

The facility traces it roots back a laboratory established in 1882 by Hermann Fol with the encouragement of Charles Darwin and continues to work to this day with organisms from the Bay of Villefranche Bay, including protists, ascidians, sea urchins and jellyfish.

In 1882, encouraged by Darwin, the zoologist and discoverer of fertilization Hermann Fol along with Jule Barrois of the Université de Lille, established a laboratory in Villefranche in a former Lazert building.

They acquired use of buildings previously leased to the Russian Navy as a coal depot in 1884, the Galériens and the Vielle Forge.

Russian, French, and American biologists including Hipployte Pergallo, Aleksei Alekseevich Korotnev, Carl Vogt, Hermann Fol, Jules Henri Barrois, Élie Metchnikoff and Louis Agassiz among others worked on the planktonic fauna and embryos collected in the bay.

[1] The marine station is situated in historical buildings constructed in 1769 as part of the military harbour of the Kingdom of Sardinia which had Turin as its capital.