The French Riviera and the hills behind Nice

The sea and the mountains

Between Nice and Menton, the Alps come right down to the sea. Three roads run along the slope, one above the other: the Basse Corniche at the water’s edge, the Moyenne halfway up, the Grande along the crest. The Basse Corniche runs through Monaco. It is not a stage on this trip, but you can pull in to see the Rock and the harbour at Monte Carlo.

Back from the sea, the hinterland of Nice looks nothing like the coast. The first hilltop villages are twenty minutes from the beaches; an hour away, you find gorges, painted chapels and larch forests. Above Cannes, Grasse owes its place as the capital of perfume to its glovemakers. In the 16th century they scented their leather to mask its smell. Perfume-making skills in the Grasse area have been on Unesco’s list since 2018.

The trip starts in Nice. You walk through the narrow lanes of Old Nice, between ochre façades, then along the Promenade des Anglais. It owes its name to the English who came to spend the winter here in the 19th century. The city has been French for good only since 1860; before that, it belonged to the House of Savoy. Nissart, the local language, still appears on the street signs. Since 2021 Nice has been a Unesco World Heritage Site as the winter resort town of the Riviera.

Further up the Roya, about twenty minutes from Saorge, Tende gives access to the Mercantour National Park and the Vallée des Merveilles. Around Mont Bégo there are some 36,000 prehistoric rock carvings, reached by a long walk. The Musée des Merveilles in Tende helps you make sense of them before you go up.

To the west, between Grasse and Vence, the road climbs the Gorges du Loup, beneath overhanging rock, between waterfalls and villages set like balconies. Gourdon is built on the edge of a cliff, more than 700 metres up, with views all the way to the sea.

The painters’ Riviera

In the 20th century the light of the coast drew painters. Matisse settled in Nice in 1917 and ended his days there. In Vence he designed the Rosary Chapel from start to finish, consecrated in 1951. Picasso worked in Antibes in 1946, in the Château Grimaldi, now the Musée Picasso. Renoir spent his last years at Cagnes-sur-Mer, Chagall at Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

At Saint-Paul, the Fondation Maeght opened in 1964. It brings together works by Miró, Giacometti, Braque and Chagall in a building by Josep Lluís Sert, among the pines.

What not to miss

1. 1Castle HillNice’s lookout, above the Baie des Anges and the rooftops of Old Nice.
2. 2ÈzeA village perched more than 400 metres above the sea, crowned by an exotic garden.
3. 3The Villa Ephrussi de RothschildA pink villa and nine themed gardens on the Cap Ferrat peninsula.
4. 4The Trophy of AugustusAt La Turbie, a Roman monument raised to the glory of Augustus to celebrate the subjugation of the Alpine peoples.
5. 5The Rosary ChapelMatisse’s total work of art, from the architecture to the stained glass and the priests’ vestments.
6. 6Cap RouxThe red rocks of the Esterel, followed by the Corniche d’Or between Saint-Raphaël and Théoule-sur-Mer.

The French Riviera in pictures

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Saint-Paul-de-Vence behind its ramparts.

The Niçois table

Niçois cooking is a humble cuisine that became a point of pride: socca, a chickpea-flour pancake baked in a wood-fired oven, pissaladière with onions and anchovies, petits farcis — small stuffed vegetables — and salade niçoise, with neither rice nor potatoes for the purists.

Bellet, one of the smallest appellations in France, comes from vines planted on the hills of Nice itself. In Menton, the lemon has its own protected geographical indication and its own festival, every winter in February.