Plan De Campagne

Plan de Campagne operates as an open-air commercial zone rather than an enclosed mall, spread across 350,000 sqm on the communes of Les Pennes-Mirabeau and Cabriès since Émile Barneoud founded it in 1966. That format, not tenant count, is what has kept it France’s most-visited retail zone: shoppers drive between standalone big-box units rather than walk a single climate-controlled concourse.

The zone splits into two functional halves. Plan Village on the southern side carries the home-and-DIY anchors, IKEA, Leroy Merlin and Conforama, while the northern sector holds the fashion galerie, restaurants and specialty retail. That split lets each half compete on its own terms rather than forcing furniture and fast fashion into shared foot traffic patterns.

Swarovski and JD Sports hold positions in the fashion sector, part of a roster of some 500 stores generating close to 1.3 billion euros in annual turnover across the site’s 8,000 jobs. The anchor food retail slot has changed hands repeatedly: a Géant Casino hypermarket became an Intermarché in June 2024, which closed the 14,101 sqm store barely ten months later in April 2025, leaving the space still under negotiation for a new occupant as of late 2025.

Access runs through two motorway exits, A7’s Les Pennes-Mirabeau interchange and A51’s Plan de Campagne exit, a redundancy that lets the zone absorb Marseille and Aix-en-Provence traffic simultaneously without a single point of failure. A planned SNCF halt linking to Marseille-Saint-Charles and Aix-en-Provence Centre would add a third access mode, with completion targeted for 2027.

At 49 million visitors a year, Plan de Campagne outdraws every enclosed shopping center in France, a figure that reflects six decades of incremental expansion rather than a single master-planned build. The open-air format that competitors have copied elsewhere in France has never matched the scale this site accumulated by being first.