The Juno Beach Centre or, in French, Centre Juno Beach, is a museum located in Courseulles-sur-Mer in the Calvados region of Normandy, France. It is situated immediately behind the beach codenamed Juno, the section of the Allied beachhead on which 14,000 Canadian troops landed on D-Day 6 June 1944.
The Centre was conceived in the 1990s by a group of Canadian veterans who felt that the contributions and sacrifices of Canadian soldiers during the liberation of Europe were not properly commemorated and represented in the Normandy region. The project, spearheaded by veteran Garth Webb and his companion Lise Cooper, began initially as a grassroots fundraising campaign that eventually gained the financial support of many institutions and businesses and the Canadian and French governments at many levels. The Centre was inaugurated on 6 June 2003. Over one thousand Canadian veterans attended the inauguration in 2003, as well as the 2004 ceremony for the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
The museum's scope is not only the D-Day landings. Through detailed and interactive exhibition rooms, the museum relates the story of life in Canada before the outbreak of the war, Canada’s civilian and military contribution to the war effort, and contemporary Canadian society in the decades since World War II.
The building itself, designed by Canadian architect Brian K. Chamberlain, is a single-storey structure with five main points, resembling a stylized maple leaf. The exterior is clad in titanium scales and stands about 100 meters back from the present line of sand dunes. A ceremonial area, which features a statue entitled Remembrance and Renewal, stands between the Centre and the dunes. A gap in the dunes is filled by a symbolic structure shaped as a landing craft—a memorial to the French Resistance. An intact German bunker, once an observation post, stands immediately in front of this memorial.
The museum also houses a temporary exhibition space which changes approximately once per year and which highlights various histories and themes relating to Canada past and present.
The Juno Beach Centre is open year round and closes routinely for the month of January. It offers guided visits of Juno Beach that are provided by Canadian students.
Famous quotes containing the words beach and/or centre:
“A young person is a person with nothing to learn
One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . .
It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first
day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet,
And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn
without running a nail in its feet. . . .
Meanwhile psychologists grow rich
Writing that the young are ones’ should not
undermine the self-confidence of which.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)