During the summer 1881, a dramatic accident comes endeuiller Marseilles, accident which, moreover, will remain in the popular memory like " the catastrophe of Prado ".
This afternoon of Sunday August 14, was organized, in a kind of amphitheatre hastily drawn up on a ground vague, near the gas works, to the 127 of the avenue of Prado (and pompeusement called " Marseilles Arenas") a great bullfight, with the participation of the toreador inhabitant of Madrid Pedro Fernandez and of its herd of bulls.
It is the crowd of the great days, an enthusiastic and particularly excited crowd. Already, to the opening of the gates, at 16 hours, of innumerable " resquilleurs " launched out to the attack of the steps, overflowing an unhappy service of a completely ineffective nature; and it was necessary to wait calms it so that the police chief of font of the district gives finally the last authorizations.
But on the scientist scaffolding of banks envisaged for 1500 places, piled up more than 2000 people, trépignant and howling with the liking of the spectacle... And sudden, at 17 hours 15, whereas the third bull enters the arena, it is the catastrophe. After light and slow oscillation, a whole part of the steps breaks down in an appalling cracking, crushing in its fall, in the medium of an enormous clamour of anguish of the hundreds of thrown into a panic witnesses.
Debris, one will come out 22 dead and one will count, on the whole, 310 wounded, more or less seriously reached.