Hiking and Walking in France
Remember the Festival des Jardins on the French Riviera and our posts about the ten contestants from Grasse to Menton? If you do, you may also remember our promise to tell you who won as soon as the standings were published. Well, today’s the day. French Riviera Garden Festival 2017 Winners! First of all, our…
No long-winded openings today: there is no time to lose. Six more contestants in the French Riviera’s inaugural Festival des Jardins are waiting for our visit! (The first four are here!) First, we are going to Antibes, or – to be more precise – to Antibes’s beach resort suburb of Juan-les-Pins, where – at Pinède Plage,…
Gardens are a part of the Riviera scenery like yachts, open-top sports cars and deposed government officials from corrupt cleptocracies. Unlike the mountains and the sea, they have not always been there but have become so much part of the cultural landscape that nobody remembers or can even imagine a time when they were not….
When we drew your attention to some of the most beautiful “Gardens of the Riviera” a few weeks ago, we failed to mention any garden to the west of Grasse. Not because there were no gardens in this part of the world but only for the reason that we had never visited any. Now, however,…
Porquerolles – the largest of the three Iles d’Hyères just off the coast in southern France – is what the Mediterranean would look like if it had never been touched by modern civilization. It says a lot, I think, that this highlights not so much what Porquerolles has been missing out on but much rather…
Today, we are off to Menton, the easternmost resort on the French Riviera, for a walk that takes in all the best things about this blessed little spot: its history, its scenic location and its vicinity to la bella Italia. The walk allows you to experience Menton’s picturesque historic town centre, provides you with splendid views…
More Riviera gardens to discover! Last week, we surveyed the area east of Monaco and strolled deep into Italy, concentrating on the coast’s “classic” garden country for Riviera gardens to discover But the less climatically blessed western part of the Riviera – where the mountains are often further away from the coast and give the…
The Riviera is famous for … well, many things in fact – speed boats, card sharps, minor royals – so it never ceases to surprise me how many of the visitors we meet have explicitly come to see one of the gardens of the Riviera. I am – to be honest – not a natural…
We continue with our tips on how to get most out of your short trip to Nice In contrast to the mountainside, the Riviera’s other great area of wilderness, the Mediterranean Sea does not require its prospective visitors to embark on a long and protracted journey: it is always there, at most a few hundred…
Holidays would be different if we had unlimited amounts of time for them, but we do not. So they are what they are, which largely means: always too short. As a rule of thumb, the more affluent people are, the more often they will go on a vacation, but – since the time available for…
