French Riviera Beaches
Many tourists like to go to French Riviera Beaches. Some may want to see the culture, history, tourist attractions, sports and society of the region. Some may want to have vacation where they can go to the beaches and see the coastline of the region. Some may want to stay at a villa, hotel, cottage, cabin,
The French Riviera is one of the most famous resort areas in the world, as much as its Italian counterpart. It extends along the Mediterranean Sea from Menton near the Italian border, including the cities and towns of Monaco, Nice, Antibes, and Cannes. Other sources extend the Côte d'Azur further west to include Saint-Raphaël, Sainte-Maxime, Saint-Tropez, Hyères, Toulon, and Cassis.
Places on the French Riviera, from west to east, include:
Cassis
Toulon
Hyères
Saint-Tropez
Sainte-Maxime
Fréjus
Saint-Raphaël
Cannes
Grasse
Juan-les-Pins
Antibes
Biot
Villeneuve-Loubet
Cagnes-sur-Mer
Sophia Antipolis
Saint-Paul-de-Vence
Vence
Nice
Villefranche-sur-Mer
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat
Beaulieu-sur-Mer
Èze
Cap d'Ail
Mandelieu-la-Napoule
Monaco
Monte-Carlo
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin
Menton
To subdue the Ligurian tribes in the 2nd century B.C., Roman legions entered the region three times. In 181 B.C., a Roman army defeated the Ligurians at Genoa; in 154 B.C., the Consul Optimius defeated the Oxybii and the Deceates, who had besieged Antibes and Nice; and in 125 B.C., another Roman army crushed a confederation of Celtic tribes and their allies. The Romans decided to establish permanent settlements, first at Aquae Sextiae (Arles) in 122 B.C., then in Narbonne (118 B.C.). In 102 B.C. the Roman general Marius defeated a new invasion of Cimbres and Teutons, and began to build a system of Roman roads through the region to facilitate the movement of troops, as well as trade, with Rome. In 49 B.C., Marseille took the side of Pompey against Julius Caesar, leading to a decline in its influence, and the rise of Arles. Veterans of the Roman legions were settled at Arles and Fréjus.
In 8 B.C., the Emperor Augustus built an imposing trophy monument at La Turbie to mark the pacification of the region. Roman towns, monuments and amphitheaters were built throughout the region, and many still survive: the amphitheater at Cimiez, above Nice; the amphitheater and Roman walls at Fréjus; farther inland in Provence, the theater in Orange; the amphitheaters in Arles and Avignon; and the triumphal arch at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Roman Provence reached its height of power and prosperity during the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. In the middle of the 3rd century, Germanic peoples began to invade the region, and Roman power began to weaken. The Western Roman Emperor, Constantine I, was forced to take sanctuary in Arles at the beginning of the 4th century.
During the same period, Christianity became a powerful force in the region. The first cathedrals were built in the 4th century, and bishoprics were established in Arles in 254 A.D.; Marseille in 314 A.D.; Fréjus at the end of the 4th century; Cimiez and Vence in 439 A.D.; Antibes in 442 A.D.; and Toulon in 451 A.D. The oldest Christian structure still in existence on the Côte d'Azur is the baptistery of Fréjus Cathedral, built at the end of the 5th century. The end of the 5th century also saw the founding of the first two monasteries in the region, Lerins Monastery on an island off the coast of Cannes, and Saint-Victor monastery in Marseille.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire in the first half of the 5th century was followed by invasion of Provence by the Visigoths, the Burgundians and the Ostrogoths, followed by a long period of wars and dynastic quarrels, which in turn led to further invasions by the Saracens and the Normans in the 9th century.
Some peace was restored to the coast by the establishment in 879 of a new kingdom of Provence, ruled first by the Bosonide dynasty (879-1112), then by the Catalans (1112-1246), and finally by the Angevins (1246-1483).
In the 13th century, another powerful political force appeared, the House of Grimaldi. Descended from a Genoese nobleman expelled from Genoa by his rivals in 1271, members of the different branches of the Grimaldis took power in Monaco, Antibes and Nice, and built castles at Grimaud, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Antibes. The present Prince of Monaco is a descendant of the Grimaldis.
In 1388, the city of Nice and its surrounding territory, from the mouth of the Var to the Italian border, was separated from Provence and came under the protection of the House of Savoy. The territory was called the comté of Nice after 1526, and thereafter had a separate language, history and culture from Provence until 1860, when it was re-attached to France under Napoleon III.
Provence retained its formal independence until 1480, when the last count of Provence, René I of Naples, died and left the comté of Provence to his nephew, Charles du Maine, who in turn left it to Louis XI of France. In 1486, Provence formally became part of France.
Until the end of the 18th century, the Côte d'Azur was a remote and impoverished region, known mostly for fishing, olive groves and the making of perfume. A new phase began when the coast became a fashionable health resort for the British upper classes in the late 18th century. The first British traveler to describe its benefits was the novelist Tobias Smollett, who visited Nice in 1763, when it was still an Italian city within the Kingdom of Sardinia. Smollett brought Nice and its warm winter temperatures to the attention of the British aristocracy with Travels through France and Italy, written in 1765. At about the same time, a Scottish doctor, John Brown, became famous by prescribing what he called climato-therapy, a change to a warm climate, to cure a variety of diseases including tuberculosis, known then as consumption. The French historian Paul Gonnet wrote that as a result, Nice was filled with "a colony of pale and listless English women and listless sons of nobility near death."
In 1834, a British nobleman and politician named Henry Peter Brougham, First Baron Brougham and Vaux, who had played an important part in the abolition of the slave trade, traveled with an ill sister to the south of France, intending to go to Italy. A cholera epidemic in Italy forced him to stop at Cannes, where he enjoyed the climate and scenery so much that he bought land and built a villa. He began to spend his winters there, and because of his fame, others followed, and Cannes soon had a small British colony.
Robert Louis Stevenson was another early British visitor who came for his health. In 1882 he rented a villa called La Solitude at Hyères, where he wrote much of A Child's Garden of Verses.
In 1864, five years after Nice became part of France, the first railroad arrived, making Nice and the rest of the Riviera accessible to visitors from all over Europe. One hundred thousand visitors arrived in 1865. By 1874 the foreign colony in Nice, mostly British, had grown to 25,000.
In the mid-19th century, with the arrival of railroads, British and French entrepreneurs began to see the potential of tourism in the South of France. At the time, gambling was illegal in France and Italy. In 1856, the Prince of Monaco, Charles III, began constructing a casino in Monaco, which, to avoid criticism by the church, was called a health spa. The first casino was a failure. Then, in 1863, the Prince signed an agreement with a French businessman, Francois Blanc, already the operator of a successful casino at Baden-Baden in the Grand Duchy of Baden in Germany, to build a resort and new casino. Blanc arranged for steamships and carriages to take visitors from Nice to Monaco, built hotels, gardens and a casino in an area called Speluges, which, at the suggestion of Princess Caroline, the mother of Prince Charles, was renamed Monte Carlo, after Charles. When the railway reached Monte Carlo in 1870, hundreds of thousands of visitors began to arrive, and the population of the principality of Monaco doubled.
In the second part of
the 19th century, thanks to the railroad, the Riviera became a popular destination
for European royalty. Just days after the line opened to Nice in 1864, Czar Alexander
II of Russia visited on a private train, followed soon afterwards by Napoleon
III and Leopold II, the King of the Belgians.
Queen Victoria, in 1887.
Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom was a frequent visitor. In 1882, she stayed in Menton, near the Italian border. In 1891, she spent several weeks at the Grand Hotel Grasse. In 1892, she stayed at the Hotel Cost-belle in Hyères. From 1895 to 1899, she stayed at the Hotel Regina at Cimiez, in the hills above Nice (the Hotel Regina later became the home of painter Henri Matisse). She traveled with party of between sixty and a hundred, including her chef, ladies in waiting, dentist, Indian servants, her bed and her own food.
Victoria and Albert's son, the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, was also a regular visitor to Cannes, beginning in 1872. He frequented the Club Nautique, a private club on La Croisette, the fashionable seafront boulevard of Cannes. He visited each spring for three weeks, took part in yacht races (he watched from shore, while the royal yacht, Britannia, was sailed by a professional crew), and he had affairs with actresses, courtesans and the wives of aristocrats in the more relaxed moral climate of the Riviera. After he became King in 1901, he never again visited the Riviera.
By the end of the 19th century, the Riviera began to attract painters, who appreciated the climate, the clear light, and the bright colors. Auguste Renoir settled in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso made their homes on the Riviera.
The First World War brought down many of the royal houses of Europe, and altered the calendar of the Riviera. After the war, larger numbers of Americans began to come, business people and celebrities began to outnumber aristocrats, and the season shifted from winter to summer.
Americans had begun coming to the south of France in the 19th century. Henry James set part of his novel, The Ambassadors, on the Riviera. James Gordon Bennett, the son and heir of the founder of the New York Herald, had a villa in Beaulieu. Industrialist John Pierpont Morgan gambled at Monte Carlo, and bought 18th century paintings by Fragonard in Grasse and shipped them to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
A feature of the Riviera in the 1920s and 1930s was the Train Bleu, the all first-class sleeping train which brought wealthy passengers from Calais. It made its first trip in 1922, and carried Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, and the future King Edward VIII.
After World War I, when Europe was recovering and the American dollar was strong, more Americans, including writers and artists, began coming. Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence (1920) at a villa near Hyères; she won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, the first woman to do so. Dancer Isadora Duncan frequented Cannes and Nice; she died in 1927 when her scarf caught in the wheel of the car in which she was a passenger and strangled her. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda first visited in 1924, stopping at Hyères, Cannes and Monte Carlo, eventually staying at St. Raphaël, where he wrote much of The Great Gatsby and began Tender is the Night.
While American visitors were largely responsible for making summer high season, a French fashion designer, Coco Chanel, made sunbathing fashionable. She acquired a striking tan during the summer of 1923, and tans became the fashion in Paris.
During the crisis of the British Monarchy in 1936, Wallis Simpson, the intended bride of King Edward VIII, was at the Villa Lou Vieie in Cannes, talking with the King by telephone each day. After his abdication, the Duke of Windsor, as he became, and his wife stayed at the Villa La Croe near Antibes.
The British novelist Somerset Maugham also became a resident in 1926, buying the Villa Mauresque near the end of Cap Ferrat, near Nice.
Alpes-Maritimes is a department in the extreme southeast corner of France. The Romans had a province called Alpes Maritimae as early as 7 BC. Its capital was Cemenelum, today Cimiez, a neighborhood in the north of Nice. At its largest in 297, this province extended to Digne and Briançon, and its capital was Embrun.
A department of this name existed in France from 1793 to 1815, but it had different boundaries and included Monaco and San Remo.
The present department was created in 1860 when the county of Nice was annexed. It was constituted out of the county of Nice and the arrondissement of Grasse in the department of Var. In 1947, the department was enlarged by the addition of the communes of Tende and La Brigue, which had remained Italian after the 1860 annexation.
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is a commune of the Alpes-Maritimes department in southeastern France. It is located on a peninsula next to Beaulieu-sur-Mer and to Villefranche-sur-Mer and extends out to Cap Ferrat. Its tranquillity and warm climate make it a favourite holiday destination amongst European aristocracy and international millionaires. It is one of the loveliest places on the Mediterranean coast. Today Saint-Jean Cap-Ferrat has probably some of the most expensive real estate in the world and continues to attract the rich and famous. It is truly one the crown jewels of the French Riviera. The luxurious properties are nestled amongst lush vegetation. Discretely built and protected from prying eyes, they often include a private beach and locked gate-ways.
Sainte-Maxime is a commune
of the Var département located on the French Riviera in the south of France,
90 km from Nice and 130 km from Marseille. The main industry is Tourism. The small
town is situated at the northern shore of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. In the north
the Massif des Maures mountain range protects it from cold winds of the Mistral.
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