🇫🇷 France · South (Provence and the French Riviera)
Cannes is the name of glamour on the Côte d'Azur. Every May, during its famous Film Festival, the city becomes the world capital of cinema: the red carpet of the Palais des Festivals, the flashbulbs, the stars and the yachts anchored in the bay. But Cannes is much more than twelve days of party: it is an elegant seaside city with a legendary promenade, the Croisette, lined with palm trees, grand hotels and beaches of fine sand, unusual on this coast of pebbles.
Behind the sparkle, Cannes keeps an older and simpler soul. High on a hill huddles Le Suquet, the medieval fishermen's quarter the city grew out of, with its cobbled lanes, its pastel-coloured houses and a superb view over the bay. And offshore, barely fifteen minutes away by boat, the Lérins islands offer nature, silence and centuries of history: the fortress where the enigmatic Man in the Iron Mask was held and a Cistercian monastery still in use.
This guide covers Cannes with a practical eye: how the Film Festival really works (and why almost no screening is open to the public), what to see on the Croisette and in Le Suquet, how to slip away to the Lérins islands and how to use the Côte d'Azur trains to combine Cannes with Nice, Antibes or Monaco. Ideal both for a day of Mediterranean luxury and for a stop on a longer trip along the Riviera.
Cannes was for centuries a modest fishing village in the shadow of the tower of Le Suquet, linked since antiquity to the nearby Lérins islands, where a famous monastery was founded in the 5th century. Its fate changed completely in 1834, when Lord Henry Brougham, former Lord Chancellor of England, was blocked in the area by a cholera cordon and stopped in Cannes. Charmed by the place, he decided to build himself a residence, and his example was followed by other British and European aristocrats, who turned the village into an elegant winter resort. In the 20th century, Cannes was definitively consecrated to glamour with the creation of its Film Festival, conceived in 1939 and first held in 1946. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Mediterranean south: Greek Marseille, the Roman Province, the popes of Avignon, the crusade against the Cathars of Carcassonne and the invention of the French Riviera, from Nice to Cannes.
Read the history of South (Provence and the French Riviera) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For almost all of its history, Cannes was no more than a modest fishing village, and its fate was tied not to the mainland but to the two small islands you can see from its shore: the Lérins islands. It was there, on the island now called Saint-Honorat, that the event took place which gave this corner of Provence its importance. Around the year 410, a hermit named Honoratus founded a monastery on the island that would become, through the 5th and 6th centuries, one of the great spiritual and intellectual centres of Christian Gaul. The abbey of Lérins produced numerous bishops and saints, and its prestige radiated across the whole region.
The monks of Lérins were, in fact, the lords of the place. The land where the small port of Cannes stood belonged to them, and it was they who, to watch the coast and protect themselves from raids by Saracen pirates, had a watchtower built on top of the hill overlooking the port —today's Le Suquet quarter— whose square silhouette still presides over the old town. Around that tower and in the shelter of the hill, the fishermen's settlement grew.
So, while neighbouring Nice was a stronghold fought over by kings and counts, Cannes remained a small, humble place: houses huddled in Le Suquet, fishing boats, vegetable plots and olive groves. Through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, life went by at the slow pace of the sea and the seasons, with nothing to suggest the brilliance the city would reach in the future. The name 'Cannes' itself evokes, on one reading, the reeds (cannas) that grew in the marshy areas and along the shores of the region.
The great turning point in the history of Cannes has a date and a name of its own: December 1834, Lord Henry Brougham. Brougham was a leading figure in England: he had been Lord Chancellor, the country's highest judicial authority, and he was a famous politician and reformer. That winter he was travelling to Italy with his daughter Éléonore-Louise, who was in delicate health, intending to spend the cold season in the mild climate of the Italian Riviera.
But the journey hit an obstacle. The county of Nice, then under the sovereignty of the House of Savoy, had closed its border with a cholera cordon, and Brougham could not carry on eastwards. As night fell, he stopped to rest at an inn kept by one Pinchinat, in what is now the port area of Cannes. And there, so tradition tells, he was charmed: by the climate, the landscape, the sheltered bay, the bouillabaisse and the wine he was served. Brougham then decided to stop his journey and have a residence built in that fishing village.
That personal decision set off a complete transformation. Lord Brougham came back every winter, and his prestige drew other British aristocrats and public figures, who in turn had villas built: General Taylor, the Reverend Woolfield, members of the British Parliament. In a few decades, the humble village became an elegant winter resort (station hivernale) for European high society fleeing the cold of the north. Sumptuous villas, gardens, hotels and even an Anglican church for the foreign colony went up. Cannes, like neighbouring Nice, reinvented itself as a winter retreat for the rich: the city of luxury and leisure we know today had been born, practically out of nothing.
Through the second half of the 19th century, Cannes grew and was embellished at the pace of the fashion for wintering by the sea. The arrival of the railway, which connected the city with the rest of France and Europe, sped up the process: every season aristocrats, industrialists and royal families arrived from all over the continent, including members of the British and Russian royal houses. Facing the sea, the great promenade that would become the city's symbol was laid out and gradually built up: the Boulevard de la Croisette.
During the Belle Époque, that period of splendour running from the end of the 19th century to the First World War, Cannes filled with the opulent architecture of leisure: grand palace hotels along the Croisette, villas with exotic gardens on the hills, casinos. The names of the great hotels that still line the seafront —the Carlton, with its monumental façade opened in the 1910s— speak of that golden age when the city lived off international elite tourism.
Unlike other towns on the coast, Cannes always kept a markedly elegant profile geared to pleasure and rest rather than to trade or heavy industry. The old quarter of Le Suquet, with its medieval tower and its church, went on bearing witness to the city's humble past, while the Croisette and its surroundings embodied the new, luxurious Cannes. Little by little, too, winter tourism gave way to summer tourism, with the fashion for sea bathing and sunshine that took hold in the 20th century and turned the beaches of the Riviera into the summer destination par excellence.
The thing that made Cannes world famous was the creation of its International Film Festival, and its origin is directly tied to the politics of the 1930s. At the time, the only great international film festival in the world was the Venice Mostra, born in 1932. But the Mostra had become an instrument of propaganda for the fascist regimes: at the 1938 edition, under the influence of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, the top prizes went to films aligned with those regimes, among them 'Olympia', the German director Leni Riefenstahl's film about the Berlin Olympic Games. Democratic delegations, such as the French, British and American ones, withdrew in outrage.
Out of that outrage came the idea of creating an alternative festival, free and independent, in a democratic country. In France it was driven by the diplomat Philippe Erlanger, and it had the decisive support of Jean Zay, minister of National Education and Fine Arts in the Popular Front government, who wanted to give France a great cultural event capable of rivalling Venice. Cannes was chosen as the venue, for its climate, its prestige and its hotel capacity. The first edition was planned for September 1939.
But history got in the way. The 1939 festival barely got as far as its opening: in the very week it was due to be held, on 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War broke out. Everything was cancelled. Jean Zay, the minister who had made the project possible, met a tragic end: Jewish, a freemason and a man of the Republic, he was persecuted by the collaborationist Vichy regime and murdered in 1944, never getting to see the festival he had helped create.
It would have to wait until after the war. In September 1946, in a France and a Europe emerging from the conflict and seeking to rebuild culture and freedom between nations, the first edition of the Cannes Festival was finally held. Over the years it established itself as the most prestigious in the world, with its top award, the Palme d'Or, and its red carpet turned into the showcase of international cinema.
The history of Cannes also holds one of the great enigmas of France, and once again it does so on its islands. On Sainte-Marguerite, the larger of the Lérins islands, stands the Fort Royal, a fortress strengthened by the engineer Vauban that served for centuries as a state prison. There, towards the end of the 17th century, the most famous and mysterious prisoner in French history was held: the so-called 'Man in the Iron Mask'.
He was a prisoner whose face had to stay permanently hidden behind a mask, and whose identity was kept in the strictest secrecy on the orders of King Louis XIV. Who was he? Why so much mystery? The question has fed centuries of speculation: he has been said to be a twin or illegitimate brother of the king himself, a nobleman fallen from grace, a diplomat who knew too much. Voltaire was among the first to spread the legend, and Alexandre Dumas immortalised it in his novels. Today visitors can see the cell where he was held and walk round the fort, which also houses a museum with archaeological finds from the sea.
In the 20th century and up to today, Cannes has lived fully off its double status: an elegant seaside city and the world capital of cinema during the days of its festival each May. The Palais des Festivals, the Croisette with its palace hotels and its yachts, and the sandy beaches sit alongside the working-class quarter of Le Suquet, the Forville market and the silence of the Lérins islands, where a community of Cistercian monks still tends vines beside the abbey, in a continuity that goes back to the 5th century.
From that fishing village in the shadow of a tower, Cannes became, in less than two centuries, a name recognised across the planet. Its history is one of an astonishing transformation, set off by an English lord stranded by an epidemic and consecrated by cinema: the story of the small Provençal port that ended up as a byword for glamour.