Casino de Monte-Carlo and Salle Garnier

The Casino de Monte-Carlo is the building Monaco was rebuilt around. After a failed first casino at the Hôtel de Russie on the Rock, a sovereign ordinance of 2 April 1863 gave François Blanc a fifty-year gaming concession, and the Société des Bains de Mer was founded that year with Blanc as president. The casino opened on the Spélugues plateau in July 1865, with the fountain and palms of the Place du Casino garden.

In 1878 Marie Blanc, François's widow, commissioned Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opéra, to rebuild it together with a concert hall; about 400 workers finished the shell in six months, and the opera opened on 25 January 1879. Charles Touzet added the Touzet salons and the projecting front in 1889–90, and the building reached its present form in 1910.

The SBM still runs it. Its terrace looks out over the sea towards the Italian coast; from 1872 to 1965 it hosted the pigeon-shooting Grand Prix. By a law of 12 June 1987, Monégasque citizens and public employees may not play. Two James Bond films feature it – Never Say Never Again in 1983 and GoldenEye in 1995.

The Salle Garnier is the opera house of Monte-Carlo, built onto the Casino and named after its architect, Charles Garnier, who had just finished the Paris Opéra. It went up in eight and a half months and opened on 25 January 1879 with Sarah Bernhardt on stage, dressed as a nymph; the first opera, Robert Planquette's Le Chevalier Gaston, followed on 8 February. Several artists of the Paris house worked on it too, Gustave Boulanger among them, and the hall seats 524.

Henri Schmit remodelled the stage for opera in 1898–99. Under Raoul Gunsbourg, director from 1892 for sixty years, it became a house of premieres – Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust staged in 1893, Massenet's Don Quichotte with Chaliapin in 1910, Puccini's La Rondine in 1917 – some forty-five world premieres in all. The hall closed for renovation in 2004–05, when the season moved to the Grimaldi Forum.