5 Days in Nice

The Cours Saleya, a long square between the old town and the sea, has hosted a market for generations. Under striped awnings you'll find piles of local vegetables and fruit, olives, cheese, bunches of flowers and herbs, and stalls of candied fruit, soap and lavender. The far end is the tourist end, souvenirs and baked goods. The near end is where locals still shop.

Breakfast is right here: a portion of socca, a thin chickpea pancake baked in a huge round pan in a wood-fired oven, cut into pieces, peppered and eaten with your fingers while it's still hot. Chez Thérésa has been selling it at the market since 1925, from a stall supplied by a wood oven in the old town.

At the east end of the square, the big yellow building at 1 Place Charles-Félix was Matisse's home and studio from 1921 to 1938, where he painted his odalisques. Halfway along, look into the Chapelle de la Miséricorde, one of the finest Baroque interiors in Nice.

Walk into the old town behind the market, a tight grid of tall ocher and red houses with green shutters, laundry strung between the windows and lanes too narrow for cars. It was the whole of Nice until the 18th century, and it still feels more Genoese than French.

On the Place Rossetti stands the Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate, built between 1650 and 1699 and dedicated to a teenage martyr whose body, the legend goes, drifted to Nice in a boat pushed by angels, which is one story of how the bay got its name, the Baie des Anges. The other, less romantic one says it comes from the angel sharks that once swam in it. Two streets north, on rue Droite, the Palais Lascaris is a 17th-century aristocratic palace with frescoed ceilings and a collection of about 500 old musical instruments, and it's worth the 5 EUR just for the staircase. Then reward yourself with an ice cream from Fenocchio on the Place Rossetti, in one of its 90-odd flavors, from lemon to thyme and lavender.

Nice has its own cuisine, and the city protects it with an official label, Cuisine Nissarde, awarded to restaurants that cook the traditional recipes with local produce. Look for the plaque by the door. The dishes to order are petits farcis, vegetables stuffed with meat and herbs, daube (beef stewed in red wine), and ratatouille, which was born here (see What to Eat and Drink).

Chez Acchiardo on rue Droite, run by the same family since 1927, is the old-town classic, a small, simple dining room full of locals at lunch.

The Colline du Château rises straight out of the old town, and despite the name there's no castle on it. One stood here for centuries, the fortress of the Dukes of Savoy, until Louis XIV's army took the town in 1706 and the king ordered it blown up. What's left is a park of pine trees, ruins and paths, with a large artificial waterfall built in 1885.

The views are the reason to come. From the top you see the whole Baie des Anges, the long curve of the Promenade des Anglais and the airport at the far end on one side, and the port and Mont Boron on the other. It's the photo on the top of this page. On the way, the Château cemetery on the hill has some of the best views and almost no visitors. Take the steps up from the end of the old town or the free lift from the seafront.

Come down the hill at Rauba Capeu, the corner where the wind "steals your hat", with its war memorial carved into the rock, and walk west along the Promenade des Anglais. It started in 1822, when the Reverend Lewis Way had the English winter residents pay for a coastal path, partly to give work to the local poor after a bad winter. It's now 7 km long, and everyone in Nice uses it: runners, cyclists, rollerbladers, families and old men reading the paper.

Grab one of the blue chairs, the symbol of the city, and turn them to face the water as the sun goes down behind the airport.

On the night of 14 July 2016, a truck was driven into the crowd watching the Bastille Day fireworks here, and 86 people were killed. Locals still remember it, and you'll see flowers left by the sea.

A few steps inland is the Place Masséna, the main square, which joins the old town to the 19th-century city. It's surrounded by red Italian-style arcades and paved in black and white like a chessboard. Above it, seven figures kneel on tall poles, Jaume Plensa's Conversation à Nice, and after dark they light up in slowly changing colors. Locals say they stand for the seven continents talking to each other.

From here, the old town's bars and restaurants are a few minutes away for dinner.

In the 19th century the Russian aristocracy wintered in Nice almost as much as the English, and in 1865 the heir to the Russian throne, the tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, died here of tuberculosis, aged 21. A chapel was built in the garden where he died, and next to it, in 1903-12, Tsar Nicholas II paid for the St. Nicholas Cathedral, one of the largest Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe.

With its onion domes in green, gold and pink, it looks like it was lifted straight out of Moscow, and inside the iconostasis is covered in icons. After a long legal battle with the local Orthodox association, French courts gave ownership to the Russian state in 2010-11.

Henri Matisse came to Nice in 1917 for the light and stayed, apart from a few years in nearby Vence, until his death in 1954. From 1938 he lived on Cimiez hill in the Excelsior Régina, the huge white hotel built in 1895-97 for Queen Victoria. The Musée Matisse, in a red 17th-century Genoese villa in an olive grove, follows him from his first paintings to the paper cut-outs he made late in life, when he could no longer stand at an easel.

In the park around it lie the remains of Cemenelum, the Roman town that was the capital of the province of the Maritime Alps, with an arena and baths. The archaeology museum next door shows what was found there.

Across the park is the Franciscan monastery of Cimiez, with a church full of Renaissance paintings and, behind it, an Italian garden of roses, lemon trees and pergolas on the edge of the hill, with a view down over the city to the sea. It's one of the quietest places in Nice.

Next to it, in the cemetery, are the graves of Matisse and of Raoul Dufy, another painter who loved the Riviera. Have a picnic in the olive grove before walking down.

Walk 20 minutes downhill, or take the bus, to the Musée Chagall, opened in 1973 while the painter was still alive and built specially to house his Biblical Message: 17 huge canvases of stories from the Old Testament and the Song of Songs, painted in deep blues and reds. Chagall helped design the building, its stained-glass windows and its mosaic, and gave the paintings himself. It's one of the most moving small museums in France.

From 10 October 2026, the temporary exhibition Chagall Couture shows how his work inspired fashion designers.

For the evening, head to the Place Garibaldi, a grand yellow 18th-century square from the Savoy days at the edge of the old town. The statue in the middle is Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italian unification, who was born here in 1807, during Nice's first French period, and was furious when it was handed to France for good in 1860. Locals still argue about how fair the vote was.

Have an aperitif under the arcades, a pastis or a glass of rosé, or a plate of oysters at the Café de Turin, the city's institution for seafood since 1908, then walk two minutes to rue Bonaparte and the streets around the Place du Pin, the liveliest bar area in Nice, for dinner.

On the other side of Castle Hill is the port, Port Lympia, dug from 1749 under the King of Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel III, and still lined with tall Italian-colored facades in red, yellow and ocher. Next to the yachts and the ferries to Corsica you'll see the pointus, small wooden fishing boats painted in bright colors, which are the traditional boats of the coast.

Have a coffee on the quay and watch the port wake up. The streets behind it are the antiques quarter.

From the east side of the port, follow the Sentier du Littoral, a coastal path of rocky steps and footbridges around Cap de Nice. It passes under the villas of Mont Boron, past small coves and through the places where people in Nice actually swim: Coco Beach and the rocks of the Bains de la Police, where the water is deep and clear.

Stop for a swim in summer and early autumn. At the tip of the cape, a long stairway climbs up to the coast road, and you walk about 800 m along the busy Boulevard Maeterlinck before the path starts again and drops down to Villefranche's Lazaret, with the town and its bay laid out in front of you. The whole walk is about 6 km.

Villefranche-sur-Mer sits around one of the deepest natural harbors on the Mediterranean, and it's the prettiest town on this stretch of coast: pastel houses climbing up from the water, a 16th-century citadel and a sandy beach. Have lunch by the harbor, then walk through the Rue Obscure, a 13th-century street that runs as a vaulted tunnel under the houses.

On the harbor, the tiny Chapelle Saint-Pierre was a fishermen's chapel used to store nets until Jean Cocteau, who loved the town, covered its walls in 1957 with drawings of the life of Saint Peter and of the fishermen of Villefranche.

Bus 15 takes you onto Cap Ferrat, the most expensive peninsula on the coast, to the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, a pink Italian palace built in 1905-12 for Béatrice de Rothschild, a banking heiress who filled it with art, porcelain and pet mongooses. The rooms are lavish, but the nine gardens are the reason to come: Spanish, Japanese, Florentine, a rose garden and, in the middle, a French garden with musical fountains on a narrow ridge with the sea on both sides.

About 15 minutes' walk away, in Beaulieu, Villa Kérylos is a faithful copy of an ancient Greek house, built in 1902-08 for the archaeologist Théodore Reinach. A combined ticket covers both villas. The flat seaside Promenade Maurice Rouvier links Beaulieu and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and a coastal path circles the Pointe Saint-Hospice at the tip of the cape if you have energy left.

Go back to Villefranche for dinner on the harbor, where the restaurants put their tables on the quay and the sea turns pink and then dark. Order grilled fish of the day or a soupe de poissons, the local fish soup with croutons, garlic rouille and cheese. It's a simpler cousin of the bouillabaisse of Marseille. Trains back to Nice take seven minutes and run until late evening.

Èze is a medieval village built on a rock needle 400 m above the sea, a knot of stone houses, arches and stairs so tight that it's car-free by necessity. It's the most spectacular of the Riviera's perched villages, and also the most visited, so come early, before the tour buses.

Climb to the top, where a castle stood until the French destroyed it in 1706, the same year as the one in Nice. Its ruins are now the Jardin Exotique, a garden of cacti and succulents with the best view on the coast: the whole Riviera from Cap Ferrat to Italy, 429 m straight down to the sea. The Fragonard perfume factory at the bottom of the village gives free tours.

From the bottom of the village, a rocky mule path zigzags down through pine and olive trees to Èze-sur-Mer on the coast, a drop of about 400 m. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spent the winter of 1883-84 in Nice, writing the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the people of Èze say he worked out its lines walking up this path. That's why it carries his name.

Going down takes about an hour, and it's steep and stony, so wear good shoes. At the bottom, the station is a few minutes' walk, and the train to Monaco takes a few minutes more.

Monaco is the second-smallest country in the world, about 2 km². In 1297 François Grimaldi took its fortress disguised as a friar, lost it again a few years later, and his family has held Monaco continuously since the early 15th century. Walk up from the station to Monaco-Ville, the old town on the Rock, where the Prince's Palace still stands on the site of that fortress. The guards change in front of it every day at 11:55.

Behind the palace, the lanes of the old town lead to the white cathedral where Princess Grace, the actress Grace Kelly, and Prince Rainier III are buried, side by side under simple slabs in the floor.

At the end of the Rock, built straight up from the cliff face, is the Oceanographic Museum, opened in 1910 by Prince Albert I, a serious ocean scientist, as a "temple of the sea". Jacques Cousteau ran it from 1957 to 1988. The aquarium in the basement, with sharks, turtles and a reef, is the main draw, but the grand halls upstairs, full of skeletons and old instruments, and the rooftop terrace with its view of the coast are just as good.

Walk around the harbor, past the superyachts and along part of the Formula 1 circuit, to Monte-Carlo. It was founded in the 1860s, when the prince, short of money, decided to open a casino, and named after Prince Charles III. The Casino de Monte-Carlo, in its present form by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, from 1878-79, is still the center of it all.

From 2pm, the gaming rooms are open to adults over 18 for 20 EUR, including 10 EUR to play with, if you bring a passport or national ID card. Watch the supercars pull up from the casino gardens rather than paying for a drink at the Café de Paris, the priciest terrace in town, then take the train back to Nice from Monaco-Monte-Carlo station.

Take the tram north to the Libération market, the one locals actually use, on the Avenue Malausséna under the plane trees. It's cheaper and less touristy than the Cours Saleya, with farmers from the hills, fishmongers, and stalls of olives, cheese and socca. Buy a pan bagnat, the salade niçoise in a bread roll, for later on the beach.

Opposite, the old Gare du Sud, the Belle Époque station of the little train to the Alps, has a cast-iron hall that reopened in 2026 as a cultural space with a library and a bar.

Back on the seafront, the Villa Masséna was built in 1898-1901 for a grandson of Napoleon's Marshal Masséna, and its rooms tell the story of Nice as the winter capital of Europe: the English lords, Russian princes, carnival posters, and the aristocrats who came for the sun and the casinos until World War I ended that world.

Next door is the Hotel Negresco, opened in 1913 by Henri Negresco, a Romanian-born hotelier, with its famous pink dome and its doorman in a plumed hat. The war ruined him, and he died in Paris in 1920, almost penniless. Its facade was recently restored, and it's still the symbol of the Promenade.

The beach of Nice is 7 km of smooth gray pebbles, not sand. They're hard to walk on and lovely to lie on, and they keep the water clear. Most of it is public and free, with showers and lifeguards in summer. Here and there, private beach clubs rent sunbeds and umbrellas by the day and serve lunch at the water's edge.

Find your spot, swim, and eat your pan bagnat. The sea is warm enough from June to October. Bring water shoes if you have them.

In the late afternoon, walk inland to the Promenade du Paillon, a long park built over the covered river that once split the old town from the new city. The first part opened in 2013, and a big extension in 2025 replaced an old theater and conference center, making it about 20 hectares of lawns, trees and playgrounds. In the middle is a water mirror of 128 jets, where children run through the mist on hot evenings, and the whole thing makes the best evening walk in town.

For the last dinner, eat the best of Niçois cooking. La Merenda, a tiny restaurant on the edge of the old town run by chef Dominique Le Stanc, who left a Michelin-starred palace kitchen to cook home food, serves stuffed sardines, daube, pasta with pistou and tourte de blettes, at a handful of tables. It has no phone, so book in person during the day.

If it's full or you're there on a weekend, choose any restaurant with the Cuisine Nissarde label, and finish the trip with a glass of Bellet, the rare wine grown on the hills of Nice itself.