The Tour de France ends this Sunday in Nice. It will be the first time the race has been completed outside Paris since it began in 1903, and the first time since 1989 that the winner’s yellow jersey will be decided in a time trial on the final day.
The Tour’s arrival in Nice also coincides with the 200th anniversary of the city’s Promenade des Anglais, a seaside promenade partly funded by the English pastor Lewis Way. Other work on the originally paved Camin dei Ingles was paid for by Way’s congregation, and the first section was completed in 1824. Two hundred years later, I’m cycling along the pink promenade, my dog Rio in the front basket. Halfway to the airport, her ears flutter in the sea breeze as we head toward the Plage des Chiens.
Tour de France cyclists will be on the same route, but will be riding bikes against la montre so we won’t have the chance to appreciate Europe’s largest coastal highway, nor the belle époque masterpieces that wind around the Rauba Capeu headland (“hat thief” in Niçois after the high winds) and run down the Promenade des Anglais past the pastel-painted houses of the Quai des États-Unis.
First on my right is the Jardin Albert 1er, dating from 1860, when Nice was annexed to France from the Kingdom of Savoy and Sardinia. Heading west, I pass the white granite Art Deco façade of the Palais de la Méditerranée, built in 1929 by American billionaire Frank Jay Gould. Then comes a series of seaside hotels: the Royal, the Westminster and the West End, before the magnificent Villa Masséna, with its collection of Napoleonic memorabilia and tropical gardens.
The energy of Nice is showcased along the Promenade des Anglais, where fireworks displays, street performers, volleyball and boules courts, Ironman, marathons and pilou games take place.
Riders will race past the Le Negresco hotel, a meringue-white belle époque palace that opened in 1913 and features a glass-domed ballroom where the doorman still wears red trousers, a blue jacket and a plumed hat. The Negresco was a popular hangout for Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Louis Armstrong; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton stayed here; and the Beatles waved from its balcony when they visited Nice in June 1965. It was also a favourite of the dancer Isadora Duncan, who had a dance studio around the corner and died here on the promenade when her long silk scarf got caught in the wheel of her sports car. A few villas down, No 54 was the home of Emil Jellinek, who named his daughter’s car company Mercedes. Today, it is a Mercedes apartment block, rebuilt in the 1930s and 1940s with, like its neighbours, art deco extensions and nautical-themed ironwork balconies.
On the beach to my left, the nautical style continues, with striped umbrellas, flagpoles, white benches, and navy chairs; one row faces the sea and another overlooks the rollerbladers, cyclists, and boulevarders walking along the street. I Prom.
Many of the opulent villas that once overlooked the beach here have been demolished and replaced by apartment buildings. One that still stands is the neoclassical Villa Furtado-Heine. Built between 1784 and 1787, it was once the home of Napoleon’s sister Pauline and is now a war veterans’ home, hidden behind a garden of fig trees, cacti and jacarandas.
One block further west is the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, a sleek cream-and-terracotta building with white marble steps and a huge auditorium that became a center of intellectual and cultural exchange in 1933. This season’s lectures include “The Love Language of Albert Camus” and “Shostakovich and Stalin’s Censorship.”
Tour de France riders will make a 180-degree turn here, heading back along the coastline and finishing at Place Masséna, but my drive to the dog beach will continue for several more kilometres. I pass rows of palm trees and the butterscotch-coloured villa of the Société Centrale d’Agriculture et d’Horticulture, built so local aristocrats can boast about the plants they’ve brought from overseas.
Before reaching my favourite beachfront properties, I pass apartment blocks called Bagatelle, L’Elisabeth, Le Margaret and Le Copacabana. They are called non-identical twins: two side-by-side villas from very different eras. Villa Collin de Huovila, number 139, was completed in 1911 – an elaborate art nouveau masterpiece topped with a samurai-helmet-style roof and decorated with angels throwing flowers at a naked caryatid. Next door is Villa Monada, a cubist mirror of its eccentric neighbour, built from white modernist blocks in the 1930s. Both are still in private hands, but almost everything along the promenade is flats or hotels.
In the late 19th century, pavilions were erected on the beach to allow hotel guests to wear their swimsuits. Carpets allowed them to walk on the pebbles without harm, and since almost no one could swim, they climbed into barrels of heated seawater. Today, the promenade has a dual-lane cycle path, water fountains, bike repair stations and a wide walkway, now protected by barriers and white steel cables after the terrorist attack in Nice in 2016, when 86 people were killed. A monument to them, Jean-Marie Fondacaro’s L’Ange de la Baie, stands opposite the Palais de la Méditerranée.
The energy of Nice is on display along the 7km Promenade des Anglais. Fireworks, street performers, volleyball and boules courts, Ironman, marathons and games Pilou It all happens here. I walk past hundreds of joggers, tourists staring at their phones, flâneurs, and grandparents pushing baby strollers to the dog beach, where Rio meets its gang.
Writing about Nice for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925, reporter Joseph Roth described “old women who looked 10 years younger with facials and diets…adorned with incredibly small lap dogs, they talked not of the past but of the future, just like other women elsewhere.” A century later, nothing has changed. Nice’s beaches are full of elderly locals swimming in the calm sea at dawn, while the dogs they left behind, wrapped in cashmere yellow jerseys, wait patiently on the beach.
To eat At Le Galet, which serves salade niçoise, seafood, pasta and Mediterranean dishes on the beach
To stay One of the huge Belle-époque hotels on the seafront in the West End (doubles from €150)
Relating to: A riot of colour and life: rediscovering Nice