 This long-term endeavour allowed the technical choices made to build Virgo to be validated; it also showed that giant interferometers are promising devices to detect gravitational waves in a wide frequency band.However, the initial Virgo detector was not sensitive enough to achieve such a detection.Therefore, it was decommissioned from 2011 in order to be replaced by the "advanced" Virgo detector which aims at increasing its sensitivity by a factor of 10.