Promenade de la Croisette

Where it sits. The Croisette is the seafront boulevard of Cannes, running roughly two kilometres along the Baie de Cannes from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès and the old harbour in the west to the Pointe de la Croisette and the Palm Beach headland in the east. It faces south-south-east, which means it gets sun on the sand all day and the light on the water goes copper about an hour before sunset. Offshore, close enough to read the trees on them, lie the Îles de Lérins: Sainte-Marguerite, where the Man in the Iron Mask was held from 1687, and Saint-Honorat, still a working Cistercian monastery that makes its own wine. Behind the boulevard the town climbs to Le Suquet, the medieval quarter on its hill, with the Esterel's red porphyry ridges closing the view west.

The story behind it. The name comes from a small cross that once stood on the eastern point. Cannes was a fishing village of a few thousand people until 1834, when Lord Brougham, the former Lord Chancellor of England, was stopped there by a cholera cordon on his way to Nice, liked it, and built a villa. British and Russian winter visitors followed. The seafront track was widened into a promenade from the 1860s, planted with date palms and umbrella pines, and lined over the next seventy years with the hotels that still define it: the Carlton, opened in 1911 with its two corner cupolas, the Majestic in 1926, and the Art Deco Martinez in 1929. The beaches are almost all concessions — private plages with matched parasols, hired loungers and restaurant service — laid on sand that has to be imported and regraded, since the natural shore here is coarse and narrow. A free public beach survives at the western end near the Palais.

On screen. Cannes is where cinema and this particular stretch of pavement became inseparable. The festival was conceived in 1939 as a French answer to the politically compromised Venice Mostra, cancelled when war broke out, and finally held in 1946. Its present home, the Palais des Festivals, opened in 1982 at the west end of the promenade — a bulky, much-mocked building whose twenty-four red-carpeted steps, the Marches, have become the most photographed staircase in the film industry. Bronze handprints of directors and actors are set into the Allée des Étoiles du Cinéma around it. Alfred Hitchcock brought To Catch a Thief here in 1954 and used the real Carlton: the beach terrace, the raft floating offshore where John Robie meets Danielle Foussard, and the hotel frontage all appear as themselves, while the interiors were built on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. Grace Kelly returned to the Croisette in May 1955 as part of the American delegation, and the photo call arranged around that visit took her along the coast to Monaco, where she met Prince Rainier III. The whole Riviera legend of the 1950s — stardom, casinos, sports cars, a princess — turns on a fortnight that began on this pavement.

What you actually see today. The promenade is flat, wide and continuously paved, with a separate cycle lane, benches every few metres and rows of Canary palms whose trunks are floodlit at night. Walking it end to end takes about half an hour without stopping. The hotel frontages are the architectural attraction: the Carlton's Belle Époque façade was restored and extended in a long closure that ended in 2023, and the Martinez keeps its 1929 lines. The luxury retail runs along the landward side — the boulevard is one of the highest-rent shopping streets in France — while the rose garden at the Pointe de la Croisette and the small Port Canto marina give the eastern end a quieter, more residential feel. Boats to the Lérins islands leave from the Vieux Port at the western end roughly hourly, a fifteen-minute crossing.

Getting there and timing. Cannes station is a five-minute walk inland from the Palais, with frequent regional trains from Nice, Antibes and Monaco; Nice airport is thirty minutes by bus 210. Parking near the front is underground and priced accordingly. Mid-May is the festival, when the promenade is fenced, the hotels are booked out a year ahead and prices triple; the town is far more pleasant in late September, when the sea is at its warmest and the light is long. Early morning belongs to runners and the crews raking the private beaches into shape, and it is the only hour when the Croisette feels like a seafront rather than a stage set.