Nice

Top things to do in Nice

1. 01

   Promenade des Anglais - the seafront and the Baie des Anges

   scenic 👍 Popular

   A seven-kilometre curve of promenade runs from the airport end of the bay to the foot of the castle hill, and it is the axis everything in Nice hangs off: Belle Epoque hotel facades on one side, palms and the famous blue chairs down the middle, a marked lane full of cyclists and skaters, and the pebble beach below. The beach is split between free public stretches and private concessions that rent out loungers and run their own restaurants. The stones are large, smooth and murder on bare feet, so water shoes are the local trick, and the shelf drops away fast a few metres out. The whole thing was begun in the 1820s as a shore path paid for by the English colony wintering here, which is where the name comes from.

2. 02

   Vieux Nice and the Cours Saleya - the Italian old town

   food history shopping 👍 Popular

   A dense grid of narrow lanes between the hill and the sea, tall ochre and terracotta houses, Baroque churches with painted ceilings, and the Cours Saleya running along its seaward edge under awnings: flowers and produce most mornings, and an antiques and brocante market instead on Mondays. This is where you eat the city's own food, standing up if it is socca, and where the bars go latest. The cathedral of Sainte-Reparate and the Palais Lascaris, a Genoese-style palace with a painted staircase and a collection of old instruments, are both a few steps off the main lanes.

3. 03

   Colline du Chateau - the hill with no castle on it

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   The fortress that gave the hill its name was demolished by Louis XIV's army in 1706 and never rebuilt, so what sits up there now is a park: pines, an artificial waterfall crashing off the cliff, the mosaic floors of the old cathedral excavated in the grass, two cemeteries, and the view that puts the whole thing on postcards - straight down over the terracotta roofs of the old town on one side and the full sweep of the bay on the other, with the harbour on the far side. A lift runs up from the seafront end near the old tower, and steps climb from the old town and from the port. Late afternoon is when the light is on the roofs.

4. 04

   Musee Marc Chagall - the Biblical Message cycle

   culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   A small purpose-built museum in an olive and cypress garden above the centre, opened in 1973 with Chagall alive and directing how it was hung. Seventeen large canvases on Genesis, Exodus and the Song of Songs fill two rooms in the order he wanted them read, and there is a concert hall with deep blue stained glass on the Creation and a mosaic of Elijah's chariot facing a reflecting pool. It takes about an hour and it is the single most concentrated thing in the city.

5. 05

   Musee Matisse and Roman Cimiez - the painter's own collection above the town

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   Matisse arrived in Nice in 1917 and stayed until he died in 1954, and the city holds what was left in his studio: paintings, bronzes, drawings, the paper cut-outs of the last years, and personal objects that keep reappearing in the pictures. The museum is a red-ochre Genoese villa in an olive grove on the Cimiez hill, and the grove is the site of Cemenelum, the Roman town that outranked Nice for centuries, with its arena and its three sets of baths excavated in the field alongside and the archaeology museum between them. Matisse is buried in the cemetery of the monastery at the top of the park. It is a short bus ride up from the centre, and worth timing so the villa and the ruins fall in the same trip.

6. 06

   Place Massena and the Promenade du Paillon - the buried river

   scenic culture arts

   The city's front room: an arcaded square of red-ochre Italianate blocks with black and white checkerboard paving, a fountain crowned by an Apollo the city has repeatedly quarrelled about, and seven resin figures kneeling on tall masts above it that glow and change colour through the night. The Paillon river runs underneath, covered over through the twentieth century, and since 2013 a long park has run along its course from the sea back past the theatre and the modern art museum: mirror fountain, lawns, playgrounds and a chain of children's play structures shaped like sea creatures. It is the flattest and easiest walk in Nice and the one families end up doing twice.

7. 07

   MAMAC - Yves Klein, Arman and the School of Nice

   culture arts

   The modern and contemporary museum sits on the park in a marble building of four linked towers, and its real subject is local: the Nouveaux Realistes and the loose group known as the School of Nice, who made this a genuinely important postwar art city. Yves Klein's blue monochromes and sponge reliefs, Arman's accumulations and sliced instruments, Niki de Saint Phalle's large donation, Ben's handwriting on everything. The roof terrace looks out over the old town and the hill.

8. 08

   Cathedrale Saint-Nicolas - the Russian cathedral behind the station

   history culture arts

   Six onion domes in pink brick, grey granite and coloured tile, built for the Russian colony that had been wintering on this coast for half a century and consecrated in 1912. It stands near the villa where the heir to the Russian throne died in 1865, which is what started the Russian connection to Nice, and it is usually described as the largest Orthodox church built outside Russia. Inside is a dim forest of icons, gilt and frescoes. It is an active church with a dress code, so shoulders and knees covered.

9. 09

   Mont Boron and the coastal path east - the walk round the headland

   scenic nature wildlife

   East of the port a wooded hill of Aleppo pines rises to a nineteenth-century fort, with signed paths through the forest park and a shore path scrambling round the point below it. You get the whole bay behind you, the harbour directly underneath, and the next cape and its villas ahead. Port Lympia itself is worth the detour on the way: a rectangular basin of red and ochre facades, fishing boats and the ferries that leave for Corsica, and one of the better places in the city to eat within sight of water.

10. 10

    Socca, pissaladiere and the Nicois table - the city's own cooking

    food

    Nice has a cuisine of its own and it is nothing like the rest of France. Socca is a chickpea-flour and olive-oil pancake baked on a copper disc in a wood oven and served scorching, torn up and dusted with pepper, eaten standing. Pissaladiere is a slab of slow-cooked onions, anchovy and black olives on bread dough. Petits farcis are courgettes, tomatoes, onions and peppers stuffed and baked; pan bagnat is a salad soaked into a round loaf; tourte de blettes is a chard tart, sweet, with pine nuts and raisins. Stockfish, ravioli and daube all show the Italian line. Local orthodoxy on the salade nicoise is absolute: raw vegetables, anchovy or tuna, olive oil, and no potato, green beans or anything cooked. Restaurants that follow the old recipes carry a Cuisine Nissarde label.

11. 11

    Carnaval de Nice - the February fortnight of floats and flower battles

    culture arts nightlife music

    One of the big pre-Lenten carnivals in Europe and the reason a lot of people come to Nice in a month nobody comes to Nice. It runs roughly a fortnight before Lent, on a new theme each year: parades of enormous papier-mache heads through the main square by day and lit up at night, and the flower battles along the seafront, where costumed riders on the floats throw thousands of stems into the crowd. The town along the border runs its own citrus festival in the same weeks, so the two are often done as a pair.

Getting to & around Nice

Know before you go