Antibes

Antibes Juan-les-Pins is three towns in one. Old Antibes, enclosed by its ramparts, with the Provençal market on Cours Masséna and the Château Grimaldi turned Picasso museum — the painter worked there in the autumn of 1946 and left his work behind. Port Vauban, one of the largest marinas in the Mediterranean, backed by the Fort Carré. And Juan-les-Pins, a seaside resort born in the 1920s.

Between the two shores, Cap d’Antibes is a wooded peninsula walked on the Tirepoil path, cut into the rock at water level. The Thuret botanical garden, created in the nineteenth century to acclimatise exotic species, sits at the top of the cape: a good share of the Riviera’s palm trees passed through it.