The ANTARES collaboration is building a neutrino telescope at a depth of 2400m in the Mediteranean Sea offshore from Toulon in France. Since 1996 the collaboration has performed R&D and site measurements to develop the technology necessary to build a telescope based on Cherenkov light detection in a marine environment. This first stage is now successfully completed and the results will be presented. Work is now starting on the construction of a detector of effective area 0.1 square kilometres to be deployed in the sea in 2002-2003. A detector of this size can search for sources of high energy neutrinos such as the galactic centre, active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts. Relic neutralinos captured in the earth, sun and the galactic centre would give distinctive signals of neutrinos in the detector. The same detector is also suitable to measure atmospheric neutrino oscillations in the range of mixing parameters indicated by the SuperKamiokande experiment.
