There are places that feel familiar even if you have never seen them. La Grande Motte, the complex built about sixty years ago on the French coast near Montpellier, is one of them. It’s no coincidence that photographers Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental chose this place as the subject of their photographic series La Cité Oasis.

For those unfamiliar with it, La Grande Motte was conceived during the period of France’s economic boom known as Les Trente Glorieuses, when paid vacations fueled the rise of mass tourism. Concerned by the growing attraction of Spanish beaches, French authorities launched the creation of new national seaside resorts. Influenced by the visionary spirit of architects like Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, Jean Balladur conceived and built La Grande Motte: a city that rose from the marshes of the Camargue, a modern utopia meant to anchor French vacationers to their homeland.

In La Cité Oasis, Broyez and Kronental walk back along the paths of memory, capturing traces of a past never fully erased: the marshes, the fishermen’s huts, the horses, the mosquitoes. Beneath its avant-garde architecture, the photographers uncover a promise of a contemporary future. La Grande Motte thus emerges as a garden city, dubbed “the new Florida of the 1970s,” where lush vegetation, naive forms, and pure colors attempt to reconnect with a mythical origin, suspended between the Mediterranean and pre-Columbian America.

The architecture itself, where water and concrete merge into a single flow, suggests a serene fusion between humanity and the world. Like a demiurge, Balladur did not merely design buildings: he created a cosmos, a new secular religion where everything converges toward Man. Here, modern tourists inherit the solar cults of the ancient Incas; they pray in futuristic chapels where portholes replace Gothic stained glass windows; they move among pyramids, spheres, and balconies that resemble toys abandoned by sleeping giants.

Broyez and Kronental’s photographs capture this surreal dimension: an architecture that appears animal, vegetal, mythological. A wall becomes the gaping mouth of a fish; a facade licks a pine tree like an ice cream cone; an interweaving of branches gently suffocates a perforated wall. Finally, the church abandons its cross to stretch its curve toward the sky in a gesture of infinite embrace. The images of La Cité Oasis tell the story of a place that feels like a mirage.