🇫🇷 France · South (Provence and the French Riviera)
Nice is the grande dame of the Côte d'Azur: a city of Mediterranean light, palm trees and ochre and pink façades looking out over the Bay of Angels. Here the sea is a deep blue, the beach is pebbles and life goes on between the elegant Promenade des Anglais and the colourful maze of the Vieux Nice. It was the winter refuge of the Russian and English aristocracy, and you can feel that legacy in its grand Belle Époque hotels, its villas and its Orthodox churches.
But Nice is not only an aristocratic postcard: it is also a living city, with an old centre that is Italian and Provençal at once, markets of flowers and vegetables, socca (a chickpea-flour pancake eaten hot with pepper) and a museum scene that is surprising for its size, led by the collections of Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse. From the Castle Hill, the view of the red rooftops and the sea is one of the most beautiful in the Mediterranean.
This guide covers the essentials of Nice with a practical eye: how to get around by tram and on the Côte d'Azur trains, what to see in the old town and in the museums, where to enjoy the beach and the food, and how to use it as a base for trips to Monaco, Cannes, Antibes or the village of Èze. It is one of the most comfortable and pleasant bases for discovering the whole French Riviera.
Nice was born around 350 BC as Nikaia, a trading post founded by the Phocaean Greeks of Marseille, who named it after Nike, the goddess of victory. The Romans built their town on the neighbouring hill of Cimiez (Cemenelum), of which an amphitheatre and baths remain. For centuries Nice was frontier land: in 1388 it gave itself to the House of Savoy, under whose sovereignty it stayed, with interruptions, until 1860, when by the Treaty of Turin and a plebiscite it became part of France. Already in the 19th century, the English first and then the Russians began spending the winter in its mild climate, and they financed the seafront promenade that bears their name today, the Promenade des Anglais. The Belle Époque filled the city with sumptuous hotels and villas. The 20th century established it as the tourist capital of the Côte d'Azur. 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.
The name of Nice is a tribute to a goddess. Around 350 BC, the Greek sailors of Massalia (today's Marseille), itself a colony founded by Phocaeans from Asia Minor, set up a series of trading posts along the coast. One of them, at the foot of today's Castle Hill, was given the name Nikaia, in honour of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, perhaps to celebrate a win over the Ligurian tribes who lived in the region. The French name Nice and the Spanish Niza descend directly from that Greek Nikaia.
The Ligurians and then the Romans lived side by side and fought over the territory. But when Rome really settled in the area, it did not do so by the sea, but on the neighbouring hill of Cimiez, a little inland. There it founded Cemenelum, which became an important town, capital of the province of the Maritime Alps and home to a garrison. Of Roman Cemenelum there still survive, in today's Cimiez district, the remains of an amphitheatre (the 'Arènes') and of large baths, which can be visited free of charge next to the Matisse Museum and the Archaeology Museum.
For centuries, then, there were two centres: Roman Cemenelum on the heights and old Nikaia by the port. With the decline of the Roman Empire and the invasions that followed, Cemenelum emptied out and it was coastal Nikaia, easier to defend on its rock by the sea, that survived and gave rise to the medieval town. Christianity left its mark early all along the coast, and very close by, on the Lérins islands off Cannes, one of the most influential monasteries in Gaul was founded in the 5th century.
Through the Middle Ages, Nice was time and again frontier land, fought over by neighbouring powers. It was part of the county of Provence and, like many Mediterranean towns, suffered Saracen raids and saw the slow growth of a walled settlement in the shelter of its castle, perched on the hill that still bears that name.
The decisive turn came in 1388. In the middle of the wars pitting the House of Anjou against other claimants to Provence, Nice took a decision that would shape its fate for almost five hundred years: the so-called 'dedition of Nice to Savoy' (dédition de Nice à la Savoie). The town and its territory gave themselves voluntarily to Amadeus VII, count of Savoy, in search of protection. From then on, with a few intervals of French occupation, Nice was tied to the House of Savoy, which would later also rule the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.
That allegiance explains much of the city's character. For centuries Nice looked towards Turin and Piedmont rather than towards Paris, and its culture, its cooking, its baroque church architecture and its colourful façades have a deeply Italian air as well as a Provençal one. For a long time Nissart was spoken, a local language related to Occitan, still visible today on the bilingual signs of the Vieux Nice. Under Savoy, Nice was a stronghold and a port; in 1543 it held out against a siege by the Franco-Ottoman fleets, helped by the legendary memory of the washerwoman Catherine Ségurane. The fortifications of its castle, however, were finally demolished at the beginning of the 18th century on the orders of Louis XIV, after one of the many French occupations of the city.
Nice only became French in 1860, and it did so as a piece in a great European diplomatic deal. In the middle of the unification of Italy, the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, ruled by the House of Savoy, needed French military support against the Austrian Empire. The French emperor Napoleon III agreed to help, but set a price: in exchange for backing the Italian cause, France would receive two Savoyard territories, Savoy proper and the county of Nice.
The agreement was sealed in the Treaty of Turin, signed on 24 March 1860. To give it an appearance of popular legitimacy, a plebiscite was organised on 15 and 16 April 1860 in which the people of Nice were to decide on annexation by France. The result was overwhelmingly in favour of the union, although many historians have pointed out that the vote was held in far from free conditions, with heavy pressure and no guarantee of a secret ballot, so its genuinely democratic character is disputed.
So, after almost five centuries under the House of Savoy, Nice became part of France. Not everyone accepted it: part of the population, and famously Giuseppe Garibaldi himself —the great hero of Italian unification, who had been born in Nice in 1807— protested vehemently at what he saw as the handing over of his native city to a foreign power. An 'Italian Nice' current went on claiming ties with Italy for decades. Even so, integration into France took hold, and the new allegiance coincided with the moment when Nice was beginning to turn into something completely new: the winter tourism capital of Europe.
Long before annexation, Nice had already found what would be its great modern vocation: hosting the rich and aristocratic of northern Europe who fled the cold to spend the winter under its mild sky. From the end of the 18th century, well-off English travellers began settling in for the cold season, drawn by the gentle climate, then considered good for the health, above all for tuberculosis sufferers.
It was that English colony that left the city its most famous feature. Around 1820, to give work to the poor after a particularly hard winter, the Reverend Lewis Way and the British community financed the building of a pedestrian path along the sea. The people of Nice named it, in their honour and with a certain irony, the 'Camin dei Anglés', that is the Path of the English: the future Promenade des Anglais, today the absolute symbol of the city.
After the English came the Russians. The aristocracy of the Russian Empire, led by the imperial family itself, made Nice its favourite wintering place. Their presence was so important that it left monumental traces, such as the spectacular Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, the largest Russian Orthodox church outside Russia, consecrated in 1912 on the spot where the tsarevich Nicholas, heir to the throne, had died in 1865. Germans, Europeans of every kind and, in time, French high society joined the English and the Russians.
That influx of fortunes physically transformed the city during the Belle Époque, the period of splendour running from the end of the 19th century to the First World War. Grand palace hotels went up, such as the Negresco (opened in 1913 with its unmistakable pink dome), along with sumptuous villas, casinos, gardens and avenues. Nice filled with opulent, eclectic architecture designed for leisure and the display of wealth. That very distinctive urban ensemble, an expression of the cosmopolitanism of winter tourism, is what led Unesco to inscribe the centre of Nice on the World Heritage list in 2021, as a 'Winter Resort Town of the Riviera'.
The 20th century changed the rhythm of aristocratic wintering. Little by little, winter tourism gave way to summer tourism: the fashion for sea bathing and tanning turned the Côte d'Azur into the summer destination par excellence, and Nice went from receiving invalids and nobles in winter to receiving crowds on the beaches in July and August. The city grew, its outskirts industrialised and its infrastructure modernised.
The two world wars hit the region. During the Second World War, Nice was occupied first by Italy and then, after 1943, by Nazi Germany. The city, which had taken in numerous refugees, including many Jews trying to escape persecution, then lived through round-ups and deportations, in particular the brutal manhunt organised by the German forces in the autumn of 1943. It was liberated in 1944.
After the war, Nice confirmed its place on the cultural map. The Mediterranean light that had drawn so many painters left an extraordinary legacy: Henri Matisse lived and died in the city (1954) and bequeathed it his work; Marc Chagall donated to the state the collection that today makes up his national museum, opened in 1973. Along with other masters of modern art linked to the Riviera, they made the region an artistic hub of the first rank. The city also acquired an airport which, by dint of growing, became the second busiest in France after the Paris ones.
On 14 July 2016, the French national holiday, Nice lived through its most tragic hour. That night, while thousands of people were celebrating on the Promenade des Anglais after the fireworks, a man deliberately drove a lorry into the crowd, covering almost two kilometres of the promenade before he was shot. The attack, claimed by jihadist terrorism, killed 86 people and injured hundreds, and shocked France and the world. The city honours the memory of the victims with commemorations and memorial spaces, and the Promenade, reopened to life, remains the luminous heart of Nice. Today the city combines that weight of memory with its long-standing vocation: capital of the Côte d'Azur, a city of art, sea and light, and one of the most pleasant bases for discovering the whole French Riviera.