French Riviera

The Côte d’Azur is not built on a single rock but two, and the contrast shows from one bay to the next. Around the Esterel, between Saint-Raphaël and Mandelieu, the relief is volcanic: a dark red rock, almost purple in places, is cut into needles and headlands that drop straight into a sea that looks even bluer against it. Further west, towards Cassis, limestone takes over again: white, vertical cliffs close around narrow calanques where the water keeps a clarity the red rock never allows. Between these two ends, the coast alternates rocky headlands, sheltered bays and peninsulas wooded with umbrella pines, never settling for long into a flat, continuous beach. The architecture of the coast carries the mark of a late, heavy arrival of visitors who came to spend the winter in the sun: large villas with ochre or pink façades and wrought-iron balconies turned towards the open sea, each surrounded by its own garden planted with palm trees that are not native here, still occupy the best-positioned plots on the heights of Nice, Cannes and Menton, set apart from one another rather than packed side by side like the buildings that now surround them. Nice's old town tells a different story: its tall, narrow façades, shutters and round-tiled roofs owe more to Italy, on which the city long depended, than to neighbouring Provence. Along the shore, the corniche roads, stacked one above another against the cliff between Nice and the border, were cut straight into the rock to open a passage where the mountain otherwise dropped right into the water. A few bends away from the sea, the hinterland changes register entirely. Villages such as Èze, Gourdon and Saint-Paul-de-Vence sit on a rocky spur or ridge, built in dry stone in the defensive manner of centuries when the coast stayed exposed to raids from the sea: stepped lanes, houses backed against one another up to the rampart, a single gate watching the only way in. Beyond these villages, the hills fill with pines, holm oaks and fields grown for the perfume trade around Grasse, which built its reputation on that craft rather than on the sea. The road narrows and winds here, and the noise of the coast disappears within the first few bends. A stay here almost always plays these two sides against each other. On the coast, people stay in a villa with a terrace and a sea view, walk down to a cove along a path cut into the rock, and follow the trail that traces the shore from one headland to the next. In the hinterland, a stone house among the pines is often preferred, cooler in summer and already out of reach of the coastal noise, even though the sea often stays visible from the heights. Both sides can be covered in a single day, but rarely in the same frame of mind: one is lived in swimwear, the other on a walking trail. The day here often plays out in two halves: mornings at the beach or at the seafront market, afternoons back up among the pines, in the shade of a terrace from which the sea is sometimes visible without being heard. The hinterland stays rural, planted with olives and vines, cut through by gorges and rivers that appear on no postcard of the Côte d’Azur — and yet it is this hinterland that explains why the rock changes colour from one headland to the next, and why some villages turn their backs on a sea they can only glimpse, from their ramparts, far in the distance.