Larvotto is Monaco's seaside breather: the district where the Principality takes off its tie, puts on its swimsuit and heads down to the beach. At the eastern end, along Avenue Princesse Grace, stretches the country's only public beach, recently renovated, with its imported sand, its seafront promenade and its beach clubs facing the Mediterranean. It is the most relaxed and luminous side of a country famous for its casinos and yachts.
But Larvotto is also 21st-century Monaco. Here you'll find the Grimaldi Forum, the large convention and exhibition centre that hosts top-level art exhibitions; the serene Japanese Garden; and, above all, Mareterra: an entire district of luxury and sustainable architecture that Monaco reclaimed from the sea, opened in December 2024, bearing the signature of architects such as Renzo Piano. A continuous seafront promenade now links the whole waterfront.
This guide explores Larvotto with a practical eye: what the public beach is like and what facilities it has, where to walk along the waterfront, what to see at the Grimaldi Forum and the Japanese Garden, and what exactly the new Mareterra district is. With concrete details to enjoy the most maritime, green and contemporary side of the Principality.
Larvotto is, to a large extent, new land. Monaco's public beach is not entirely natural: it was created by reclaiming land from the sea and bringing in sand, during the major expansion works that transformed the Monegasque coastline from the 1960s-70s onwards to give the Principality, always short of space, a proper beach and waterfront. That policy of growing over the sea has culminated in our time with Mareterra (L'Anse du Portier), a 6-hectare eco-district opened in December 2024 that increased Monaco's surface area by around 3%. On this same waterfront the Grimaldi Forum was built in 2000, and for decades Avenue Princesse Grace — named in honour of Princess Grace — has been one of the most expensive addresses in the world. The full story of how Monaco grew over the water is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Monaco of luxury and the Belle Époque: the district of the famous Casino and the Monte Carlo Opera, and the Larvotto seafront with its beach, the Grimaldi Forum and the new district of Mareterra, reclaimed from the sea.
Read the history of Monte Carlo and the coast →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 15 activities in Niza. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Larvotto, you have to understand Monaco's oldest obsession: the lack of room. With barely two square kilometres wedged between the mountains and the sea, the Principality is the second-smallest country in the world, after the Vatican. Every square metre is worth a fortune, and for generations the question facing Monaco's rulers has always been the same: where do you put the people, the hotels, the services and the new wealth, if the country can't grow sideways or up the mountains?
The answer, given again and again over the last century and a half, has been a bold one: grow into the sea. Monaco can't annex land from its French neighbours —its border has been fixed by treaty since the 19th century—, so the only way left to expand is out over the water. Reclaiming land from the Mediterranean, filling in the seabed near the shore to create new ground, became state policy and a speciality of Monegasque engineering.
Larvotto, the eastern district, is one of the great results of that policy. Much of what is now its beach, its avenue and its seafront did not exist naturally: it is man-made land, won from the sea during the major works of recent decades. Here, more than in any other district, you can see how Monaco literally invented part of itself.
The great architect of modern Monaco was Prince Rainier III, who reigned from 1949 to 2005 and went down in history as the 'builder prince' (le prince bâtisseur). During his long reign, the Principality was completely transformed: it filled up with apartment towers, modernised and, above all, grew out over the sea, expanding its surface area by around a fifth. Rainier understood that to secure the independence and prosperity of his tiny country, he had to give it space where there was none.
In the eastern sector, that policy shaped the Larvotto we know today. In the 1960s and 1970s, the land reclamation that created the seafront was carried out, giving the Principality something it had been missing: a real public beach. Larvotto Beach, with its imported sand and neatly laid-out sections, is no accident of geography but a project designed to give Monegasques and visitors a place to swim, in a country that until then dropped steeply into the water with hardly any usable shoreline.
At the same time, the Avenue Princesse Grace —named in honour of Princess Grace (Grace Kelly), Rainier's wife— gradually took shape as the luxury residential axis of eastern Monaco, lined with tall buildings overlooking the sea. Decades later, this avenue would be ranked among the addresses with the most expensive square metre on the planet. The beach district thus became a byword for both the open sea and exclusive real estate.
Larvotto's expansion wasn't only about housing and leisure: it had a cultural side too. In 2000, the Grimaldi Forum opened on the district's seafront, a large convention and exhibition centre partly built over the sea, with spacious glass halls looking out onto the Mediterranean. It was created to give Monaco a modern venue able to host international congresses, trade fairs, concerts, ballets and major art exhibitions.
Since then, the Grimaldi Forum has earned its place on the Riviera's cultural map thanks to its summer exhibitions: ambitious shows devoted to great artists, civilisations or historical themes, with loans from museums around the world, which every summer become one of the coast's main cultural events. The building is also one of the regular venues of the prestigious Ballets de Monte-Carlo and the Opera, heirs to the artistic tradition the city has nurtured since the Belle Époque.
With the Grimaldi Forum, Larvotto added a first-rate cultural dimension to its maritime and residential character. The district born from filling in the sea to make a beach also became a showcase for art and major events, confirming Monaco's knack for packing the functions of a big city into a tiny space.
The old policy of reclaiming land from the sea reached its most ambitious and contemporary expression with Mareterra, the district inaugurated on 4 December 2024 by Prince Albert II. On some 6 hectares won from the Mediterranean between Port Hercule and the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco built a luxury eco-district that enlarged the national territory by around 3%, the biggest expansion since the major works of Rainier III.
The project —formerly known as L'Anse du Portier or Le Portier— was a feat of engineering and of spending: around 2 billion euros and nearly a decade of work. To support the new ground, huge concrete caissons were sunk into the seabed, and on top of them residences, villas and public spaces were built, designed by world-renowned architects such as Renzo Piano and the firm Valode & Pistre. Unlike the 20th-century reclamations, Mareterra was conceived with a strong ecological focus: thousands of square metres of solar panels, hundreds of electric vehicle charging points, almost a thousand trees planted and a Mediterranean pine grove.
The new district's most significant detail may well be environmental: during construction, to avoid harming the neighbouring marine reserve, meadows of Posidonia oceanica —the protected seagrass that is essential to life in the Mediterranean— were carefully transplanted. Although Mareterra's residences are private and astronomically priced, the district includes a seafront promenade, gardens and open-air artworks that are open to everyone. It sums up today's Monaco: growing over the sea, yes, but trying to do so without destroying it.
Today's Larvotto embodies a fascinating tension: that of a country that needs to grow over the sea while also setting out to protect it. In front of the man-made beach lies the Réserve du Larvotto, a marine protected area that preserves Posidonia meadows and a surprising amount of biodiversity for such a built-up coast. The fact that you can snorkel and see fish, sea urchins and starfish just a few metres from one of the most expensive waterfronts in the world says a lot about the Principality's ecological ambitions.
That commitment has a name: Prince Albert II, who has reigned since 2005 and has made ocean protection and the fight against climate change one of the hallmarks of his reign, following the scientific legacy of his great-great-grandfather Albert I, founder of the Oceanographic Museum. Under his leadership, Monaco combines property development with marine reserves, renewable energy and environmental commitments, in an ever-delicate balance between development and conservation.
Today, Larvotto is Monaco's brightest and most relaxed face: the beach where the country gets its tan, the continuous seafront promenade linking the sand with Mareterra and Monte Carlo, the peaceful Japanese Garden that Princess Grace wanted to give the city, and the Grimaldi Forum with its major exhibitions. A young district, largely invented on the water, that captures Monaco's recent history like no other: the story of a microstate that, in order to keep existing and prospering, has never stopped reinventing itself metre by metre, taking land from the Mediterranean.
