International audience; The VIRGO interferometer is the largest ground based European gravitational wave detector operating at the EGO Laboratory in the Pisa, Italy; countryside. During the last commissioning period relevant progress have been done in approaching its design sensitivity all over the detection bandwidth. Thanks to the effort of the whole Collaboration a long scientific run has been done collecting data for more than 4 months in conjunction with the LIGO detectors. The results obtained from the detector point of view are: a very good stability and a duty-cycle as high as 81% in science mode. In this paper we present the status of the VIRGO interferometer giving an overview of the experimental apparatus together with its most relevant features.