Antibes is the Riviera town that has kept its own life. There is a market that sells to residents, a football pitch, schools, a fishing quay, and a fortified old town that was there five hundred years before anyone came here for pleasure. It also holds the largest yacht harbour in Europe and one of the most expensive residential peninsulas in the world. The combination is unusual, and it is the reason we send more guests here than the town’s reputation would suggest.
The geography
Three parts. Old Antibes, inside the Vauban ramparts, with the covered Marché Provençal at its centre and the Picasso museum in the Château Grimaldi on the sea wall. Port Vauban immediately north, where the largest private yachts in the world lie on the Quai des Milliardaires. And Juan-les-Pins on the far side, facing west across the bay toward the Estérel, with sand, umbrella pines and the sunsets.
Between them, the Cap d’Antibes — the wooded peninsula of walled properties and the Hôtel du Cap. We treat that separately in our guide to the Cap, because it functions as its own address entirely.
- Cap d’Antibes — walled gardens, sea on both sides, complete privacy. The premium address of the commune.
- Above Juan-les-Pins — westward views, sunsets, five minutes from sand.
- The old town — apartments rather than villas, but you live inside the market and the ramparts.
- Chemin des Sables and the Garoupe side — quieter, greener, close to the best beach.
The market, and the mornings
The Marché Provençal on Cours Masséna runs every morning except Monday out of season, and it is the real thing: growers from the Var, a fishmonger who will tell you what not to buy today, olives, socca, flowers. Go before nine. Around it, the old town’s streets are worth an hour of aimless walking — the Absinthe bar in the cellar, the ramparts walk out to the Bastion Saint-André, the small stone beach beneath the château where locals swim all year.
The Musée Picasso occupies the castle where Picasso worked in the autumn of 1946, and it holds the work he made there. It is small, it takes forty minutes, and it is among the most affecting museums on the coast precisely because the paintings have never left the building they were made in. Our art and culture guide places it in the wider circuit.
We hold houses on the Cap and above Juan-les-Pins, several of them privately.
Port Vauban
Worth an evening walk even if you are not chartering. The Quai des Milliardaires holds boats of a scale that has to be seen from the dock to register, and the port as a whole is a working one — refit yards, crew agencies, chandleries, several thousand people whose profession is yachts. It is also, practically, one of the best places on the coast to visit a yacht before chartering it, since much of the Mediterranean fleet winters here. The mechanics are in our note on how a charter is arranged.
Juan-les-Pins
A resort built in the 1920s by Americans who wanted a summer season where there had only been a winter one, and it has never entirely shaken the period. The beach is sand rather than pebble, the pine wood comes down to the sea, and the western exposure gives it the best light on this stretch of coast at seven in the evening.
In July it hosts Jazz à Juan, in the pinède, which is the oldest jazz festival in Europe and genuinely good. It also fills the town for a fortnight. Plan deliberately around it.
Eating
Antibes eats well and unpretentiously. The old town holds a dozen good small restaurants and two or three serious ones; the Cap holds the grand hotel dining rooms; Juan holds the beach clubs, several of which serve a considerably better lunch than their appearance suggests. La Garoupe beach in particular is where we send guests for a long lunch with a swim either side.
Book anything of consequence a week ahead in July and August, and rather longer for the hotel restaurants on the Cap. The wider starred map is in our selection of Michelin restaurants.
When to come
May and June, when the market is at its best and the Cap is quiet. September, for warm water and a town that has returned to itself. July and August are busy — Juan-les-Pins especially — but the Cap absorbs the season better than almost anywhere else on the coast, which is precisely what its walls are for.
If you are weighing Antibes against Cannes or Nice for a base, the deciding question is usually whether you want a resort, a city, or a town. Antibes is the town, and for a fortnight with family it is very often the right answer. We would be glad to compose the stay around it.