- Nice
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France
A laid back, small town in the Roya valley hard up against the border with Italy.
Easily accessible by train from Nice and surrounded by beautiful hills perfect for exploring by foot or cycle.
Great entry point to the Mercantour National Park.
The town has its share of interesting buildings including an ancient bridge and the baroque Saint Michel cathedral set in an impressive town square.
With plenty of places to eat well Sospel is a peaceful haven away from the hectic coastal area.
This hilltop town above Menton claims to be the highest coastal town in Europe at 780m above sea level, although even with a catapult you'd struggle to dive into the ocean from here.
The views over Menton, Monaco and the surrounding valleys are truly fabulous and there are at least a couple of restaurants to admire them from.
The town is only 20 minutes drive from Menton, or less from the corniche roads and motorway, but feels off the beaten track.
For the adventurous, try climing to the old XII fort and medieval garden at the top of the town which are in a shambolic state of disrepair.
The town contains numerous vaulted passageways and you can admire beautiful houses dating back to the XV century, with their magnificently restored doorways.
For those looking for more recent history, the town is the entry point for a tour into what remains of the Maginot Line fortress.
The restaurant with the best views in town is Le Righi, 1 place du fort, 06500 Sainte-Agnès. Reservations are recommended and can be made on: 04 92 10 90 88.
Sainte Agnes is 10km north of Menton. Menton is near the French-Italian border.
Map: tinyurl.com/37mx5l
For €1.30, single, you can travel all round Nice as far as Cannes, Monte Carlo and Menton.
Buses are frequent and run to timetables.
Main bus station in Nice
Map: tinyurl.com/3x6f3v
The D2566 from Sospel to Turini is better know to Monte Carlo Rally fans as the Col du Turini, and is awe inspiring in terms of scenery and challenging to drive or ride.
Half way along is the small church of N.D d'la Menour. You park and climb above and away from the road up to the small courtyard of the church.
It is blissfully peaceful with the smell of the lavender and buzzards circling below in the valley.
My brother and I spread my mother's ashes there, as a more beautiful spot I can't imagine.
D2566 from Sospel to Turini. Take the D2204 from Nice to Sospel.
Travelling around Nice in summer can be tiring because of the crowd and noise. Wanna have some quiet time on your own with fewer people? Take a 20-min train to a small town called Villefranche.
It's a hill-top village with stunning view along the coast. There are some more villages nearby for you to explore if you are not very fond of the noisy crowd. You may find them more fascinating than the busy Nice!
Check the train schedule at any train station.
A sheltered beach with bar/loungers on St Jean Cap Ferrat. Facing in to the mainland, with a lovely view over the bay to Beaulieu-sur-Mer and just a hint of Monaco to your right. A lovely place to soak up the sun all day, while watching the yachts come and go. If you happen to turn up via yacht, just call the bar (phone number writ large across the second storey) and they'll powerboat out to pick you up.
Walk along the signposted coastal promenade from Beaulieu Sur Mer to St Jean Port, or take the 81 from Nice Gare Routiere (1 euro 30). It's about 5 km out the other side of the Port.
Beautiful restaurant with very nice service and a reasonable price tag. We had oysters which were out of this world.
Oysters were not previously palatable for both my wife and I, but this experience was to die for.
We have not stopped eating them since! So now we are all zinced up and with a few of the shampoo bubbles we have been lifted to a new way of life.
I do believe there is so much investment in Nice from foreigners, that there are ample opportunities to rent your apartment direct with an English speaking owner.
Gone are the days where the agent is king. The direct approach seems to me to have more choice and it is more cost effective. I booked direct with a stunning apartment just a couple of streets from the famous Negresco Hotel and one minute from the beach. I got an excellent two week deal with a pretty good discount.
I did scour around whilst I was there to get prices for hotels. Every thing at the time of my trip was over €100 per night for a double room. I paid €65 per night, plus I had all the comforts of my own kitchen and plenty of space.
So in all I saved €490 for the two week period, which effectively made our flights free and gave us a couple of decent nights out in town.
We eventually booked with a couple who have lived there for over three years. They handled everything professionally and we were very impressed. We will be back for sure. There are plenty of sources on the web to find owners but we did find this particular couple very friendly and professional.
The department of the Alpes Maritimes is in the south east corner of France and boasts such famous names as Nice, Antibes and Cannes. These names conjure up images of glitz, beaches and everything synonymous with the Riviera jet set, bikinis and painted toe nails. However did you know that just an hour and a half inland, life is very different, a landscape of quiet forests and deep gorges? So near but yet so far from the busy coastal strip, the rural way of life still prevails, eggs and goats’ cheese are sold direct from the farm, roads are single track and you are very likely to meet a flock of transhumance sheep coming the other way.
There is an impressive network of paths for walking (including the GR4 and GR510), whose gentle gradients date back to the time when all forms of commerce passed along these remote paths on the back of a donkey. The paths are well sign posted, free of litter, well maintained, they take you through abandoned olive groves, across Napoleonic bridges, to hamlets that roads have yet to reach, lavender and thyme grow wild everywhere and it is rare to meet another soul. The area is made up of many folded ridges giving wonderful ridge walks too with views south to the Mediterranean or north to the jagged peaks of the Mercantour National park.
The area is heavily wooded so there are lots of forestry tracks to explore by foot, by mountain bike or on horseback. Roads such as the one linking St Auban and Aiglun are narrow and wind through stunningly precipitous scenery, ideal for cyclists, with excellent surfaces, very little traffic and a good sprinkling of cols. The roads circumnavigate the abundant gorges which have made the area a base for canyoning and rock climbing. You can don a wetsuit and helmet and follow your guide down one of the numerous canyons, abseiling and crossing wire bridges, jumping into pools several metres below you.
The Alpes Maritimes boasts 300 sunny days per year but if you do fancy a day indoors why not go round one of the many show caves that this limestone area has to offer, or if you want more of an adrenaline rush there is the world's first ever under ground via ferrata and a forest of adventure where you can literally go on a tree top walk and slide down a 470m zip wire.
If you are not scared of heights, there is plenty of opportunity to try paragliding at one of the many flying schools or take a tandem ride to get the best view of the area. This rural corner of the Alpes Maritimes is littered with time forgotten villages, where narrow streets disappear off between closely huddled old stone houses, wandering around these quiet little streets it is so difficult to believe that the busy Mediterranean coast is only just down the road. The area has many wonderful little restaurants and auberges, serving real French food to a clientele that is by and large local.
If you would like to know more about the Alpes Maritimes inland from the busy Cote d’Azur have a look at the website www.pottyplace.com. The site has been written by a Scottish couple who live in the Alpes Maritimes.
This is a small, friendly hotel in the Old Town. I am not usually a fan of hotels, I prefer apartments these days, but I needed to pop to Nice for just two days and Villa la Tour was recommended to me. It is right in the Old Town on Rue de la Tour. It has less than 10 rooms and used to be a nunnery until the owners converted it. The lady who runs it used to work at the Negresso and she has customer service sewn up. They have their own website if you need to look them up. A cute and reasonably well-decorated place to stay for a short break.
www.villa-la-tour.com
Rue de la Tour, (near to the bus station at the top of the Old Town)
This is an olive oil shop and restaurant in the Old Town of Nice. The owner is one of the most enthusiastic we have ever met. We had no idea how much variety there could be in the taste of the oils and how much the different olive oils can bring out the taste of the food. My advocado starter was amazing and my new hubby also loved his goats cheese starter. I had lasagne and he had rabbit for the main course which were great too. And the tiramisu to polish it all all, fantastic. It's such a friendly place, but we would have never had gone if it hadn't been recommended to us by Matt and Gayle at Nice Pebbles who rented our apartment to us. If you're in Nice, you so must go to Olivieria. It's not to be missed.
Rue de Collet, Vieux Nice
www.oliviera.com
The guidebooks I read before setting off to Nice failed to mention Cagnes. I wanted to go to Renoir's museum so that's why I went. I was very taken with the place. I imagine it's like Brighton was in the 1960s but with a lot more class and a lot more sun. Pay this place a visit. There are restaurants a plenty and they are much cheaper than in Nice yet to the same standard. There are so many children here having fun in the sun too. A very sweet family holiday place which I intend to recommend to my niece's ma and pa.
This is a fantastic restaurant on Rue Lascaris just off the port. It's fantastic and well deserves its Michelin star. The chef is Finnish and it's just a little bit different to the usual whilst still tasting great. The menu changes every day and you can eat outside too.
Rue Lascaris.
www.jouni.fr
Tel: 33 4 9708 1480
Be wary when selecting property rental companies. Try to get as much information as possible about the property before you arrive.
We stayed in Nice for a week last year with accommodation organised by TotallyNice, a rental company. Unfortunately, the apartment was entirely unsuitable for us. It was located near the train station, which turned out to be one of the most dangerous areas of Nice, and the neighbours downstairs were a nightmare, playing loud music until 5am.
For anybody booking an apartment in Nice: the 'undesirable neighbourhoods' are the area near the train station, the port and Malaussena. Anywhere else in the centre of town seemed perfectly safe.
Personally, I plan to avoid using 'rental companies' in the future, and approach the property owner directly.
However, don't let my bad experience put anybody off Nice. I had a wonderful time there and I plan to return very shortly. It's a beautiful city.
Take the train everywhere! They always seemed reliable and they go right along the coastline by the beaches and sea - some of the views are amazing. Watch out in particular for Beausoliel and Villefranche. The trains might not be the nicest sometimes and you might get a bit hot and sticky, but I think it's well worth it.
You do not need any season tickets for the buses on the Cote d'Azur. They are already absurdly cheap to us folk living in rip-off Britain. It costs just 1 euro 30 cents to take the 2 hour bus journey from Nice to Cannes, with lots of wonderful stops en route (including Graham Greene's Antibes). For 90 pence you cannot go much further than 5 stops in Britain, but for the same 90 pence you can go from Nice all the way through Monte Carlo (the bus stops just yards from the harbour with all the millionaires' yachts) and on to Menton just a mile short of the Italian border.
Apart from in the main station area, there are very few internet cafes in Nice, and this is the only place in the Old Town.
Serving food with fresh ingredients from the market, drinks and snacks, it's a very friendly cafe run by a young Englishman who has lived in Nice for 15 years. There are seven terminals in a separate room, printers and so forth, and ethernet and power sockets by each table in the cafe itself. Also has wi-fi and cable TV for main sporting events.
Happy hour for drinks from 5pm, and English breakfast is on the menu too.
8 rue St Vincent (corner of rue Pontin), 06300 Nice;
04 93 62 68 86;
e-mail: cafe@wanadoo.fr;
Open 9am to 7-ish. Closed Sundays
Free, cheerful help to find accommodation within your budget. The multilingual staff will ring likely places for you to make sure there is a vacancy and are especially good at finding cheap rooms in the old city.
Next to the railway station
This very friendly gay/lesbian bar has a wide selection of wines and other drinks. Generous portions of freshly-prepared snacks are also available.
Also worth a visit for the super murals on the wall, and it offers a showcase for local artists working in various media.
Clientele is mainly, but not exclusively, lesbian and gay.
5 rue Halévy, 06000 Nice
Tel +33 04 93 87 07 04
Visit the Roman arena in Cimiez in spring and see the wild orchids growing among the remains of a villa.
Take the "train des merveilles" to Tende passing across perilous viaducts and through helicoidal tunnels, and visit this very unspoilt village way up in the mountains near the Italian border.
Avoid going to Nice before 2008 - all the main street (Avenue Jean Medecin) and the Place Masséna are in chaos - works for the future tramway - with dust everywhere, traffic problems, uneven footpaths etc.
Is this your business?Search Been there
