It was in the early 1990s, when contemporary metal wrecks were still relatively neglected by underwater institutions and archaeologists, that the concept of the Underwater Museum ™ was born in the Pays de Lorient. Faced with the problems of representation, conservation and protection of this unknown component of maritime heritage, it seemed necessary to invent an original way of working for the promotion of these sites. Thus the original concept of a "submerged museum ", each wreck being conceived as the underwater room of a museum!
At the heart of its creation, underwater photographic and audio-visual images; the collection in Brittany, in France and abroad of interviews with sailors, witnesses or victims of shipwrecks; archival research to identify wrecks and contextualise their history.
Then 1999 saw the opening of the first visitors’ area in the heart of the Keroman submarine base, within the oldest submariner rescue centre in the world, the former German tauchtopff renamed "Davis tower" by the French Navy after the war. In this totally extraordinary place, where for five decades successive generations of submariners trained in shipwreck procedures, the Underwater Museum had found its land-based home, allowing all visitors to "dive" into the maritime history of the Second World War in the Pays de Lorient.
