In the wake of a daring daylight heist that exposed significant security vulnerabilities, the Louvre Museum has relocated some of its most valuable jewels to the Bank of France. The transfer, overseen by a secret police escort on Friday, moved the treasures to a highly secure vault located 26 meters below the Bank’s headquarters in central Paris. This vault, known as the “Souterraine,” houses 90% of France’s gold reserves, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, and other national treasures, with an estimated total value of €600 million (£520 million).
The Souterraine is designed to withstand all forms of attack, featuring a 50cm-thick, seven-tonne flame-resistant concrete door reinforced with steel, and a 35-tonne rotating concrete turret that prevents forced entry. This move comes after masked thieves used an angle grinder to breach a reinforced window in the Louvre’s Gallery of Apollo last Sunday, making off with treasures worth €88 million (£77 million), including a necklace belonging to Napoleon’s wife, Empress Marie-Louise, and a diadem of Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugenie.
Despite the swift action by the thieves, who used a mechanical ladder on a lorry to access a first-floor balcony, two of the stolen items, including Empress Eugenie’s Crown, were later found near the museum. French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez expressed confidence that the perpetrators would be apprehended. However, Louvre director Laurence des Cars highlighted the museum’s weak and aging infrastructure, revealing that the sole security camera monitoring the exterior wall where the break-in occurred was facing the wrong direction.