Tunnel de l’Ave-Maria

Tunnel de l’Ave-Maria is a former railway tunnel running beneath the Ave-Maria plateau between Outreau and Le Portel, near Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France. The 1,891-metre tunnel was constructed between 1926 and 1929 to create a direct freight connection between the railway yards at Outreau and the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, allowing goods trains to avoid the increasingly congested Boulogne-Ville station and the longer route around the plateau. Built wide enough for two tracks, the tunnel opened to traffic on 29 January 1929. During the Second World War, the German military incorporated the tunnel into the defences surrounding the strategically important Channel coast. A long-range railway gun was sheltered inside it, and Adolf Hitler visited the site during his tour of the occupied coast in December 1940. From 1970, passenger trains also travelled through the tunnel to Boulogne-Aéroglisseurs station, where passengers could transfer directly to cross-Channel hovercraft services. These trains disappeared when the hoverport closed in 1991, while freight traffic continued until around 2011. The disused tunnel, its weathered portal and the remains of the former hoverport have since created an unusually intact piece of industrial infrastructure on the coast and have attracted film and television productions looking for an abandoned or post-apocalyptic environment.

Tunnel de l’Ave-Maria has appeared in Coincoin et les Z’inhumains (2018) and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023–). Bruno Dumont uses the tunnel entrance and neighbouring former hoverport as part of the real Côte d’Opale landscape in Coincoin et les Z’inhumains (2018), turning the area into a makeshift migrant camp. The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023–) makes much more extensive use of the tunnel in the second-season finale «Au Revoir Les Enfants» (2024), where it stands in for the Channel Tunnel connecting France and England. The production filmed at Le Portel for several days in December 2023, filling the abandoned railway tunnel with walkers and transforming a 1.9-kilometre local railway tunnel into part of the fictional 50-kilometre passage beneath the English Channel.

In Coincoin et les Z’inhumains (2018), Tunnel de l’Ave-Maria appears during Bruno Dumont’s return to the strange world of P’tit Quinquin, with the entrance of the tunnel and the neighbouring abandoned hoverport used as a makeshift camp occupied by migrants on the Côte d’Opale. The location appears during the opening part of the four-episode series as Commandant Roger Van der Weyden and Lieutenant Rudy Carpentier encounter the migrants while investigating the increasingly bizarre events taking place across the region. Van der Weyden manages to cover himself in diesel fuel during the visit before a makeshift tent collapses over him, turning the bleak industrial surroundings into another setting for Dumont’s physical comedy. Coincoin and other young men associated with the nationalist Bloc are also shown moving through the migrant environment around the tunnel. Unlike its later appearance in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023–), the tunnel is not disguised as another location: Dumont uses the real abandoned infrastructure of Le Portel and the social landscape surrounding it as part of the series’ deliberately recognisable Côte d’Opale setting.

In The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023–), Tunnel de l’Ave-Maria provides the Channel Tunnel in the second-season finale «Au Revoir Les Enfants» (2024). After Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier abandon their attempt to leave France by air, Fallou introduces them to Scottish survivors Angus and Fiona, who know another possible route to Britain. The group, joined by Stéphane Codron, reaches what the story identifies as the Channel Tunnel and begins walking beneath the English Channel towards England. Inside they pass an abandoned border checkpoint where British soldiers have died, before discovering sections of the tunnel covered in strange bioluminescent growth and populated by similarly glowing walkers. Bat guano accumulated underground produces psychoactive effects, and the survivors gradually begin hallucinating. Carol sees her dead daughter Sophia and even a walker version of herself, while Codron sees his brother Michel and turns against Daryl after confusing reality with the hallucination. Daryl experiences visions of Isabelle and his grandfather as the group disintegrates around him. Angus and Fiona eventually reveal that they are willing to sacrifice the others to secure the remaining gas masks for themselves, forcing Daryl to kill them. Daryl and Carol reunite, put on the masks and continue towards England as the season ends, while Codron has disappeared deeper into the tunnel. Although the story presents the location as the Channel Tunnel, these scenes were filmed inside the much shorter and long-disused Tunnel de l’Ave-Maria at Le Portel. The production spent several days there in December 2023, with local reports specifically describing walkers filling the tunnel during filming.

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