Hiking and Walking in France
Castellar is a vaguely picturesque medieval village just to the north of Menton on the French Riviera, and on its own (we might as well be honest about this), it is not worth the trip. Castellar’s 972 inhabitants may hate me for saying this, but such are the risks of boldly speaking truth to power….
Over the years, this blog has featured many different kinds of walks for different occasions: exhausting hikes as well as gentle strolls, explorations of the wild and urban walks with a cultural theme, walks for summer and walks for winter, walks that you can spread over several days and walks that you can squeeze in between…
Enough about painters and the French Riviera! Entire books have been written about the way in which the great modernists of European painting – from Monet to Picasso – fell in love with the lights and the sights and the colours of southern France. You don’t even have to go to the library to read…
Forget what the French Government wants you to believe: public servants do make mistakes – which is why we were given 20 glorious minutes to explore the most famous garden in the Riviera our own The whole point of this blog is to tell you about hikes and urban walks so you can do them…
Returning, after some time, to a place where you have been before can be an interesting experience Last week, we were back in Paris for two days after a two-year absence and, before that, a two-decade-long stint. We were surprised how much had changed in such a relatively short while around our former neighbourhood: the…
A multi-site exhibition in Nice celebrates the past and the present of France’s second most famous and most attractive boulevard The past is a foreign country, the novel “The Go Between” famously begins, and although we all know that “they do things differently there”, we are often insufficiently aware of the size of the gap…
Biot is that rare thing of a Riviera hilltop town: as unassuming, authentic and unspoilt as you can expect any town in this part of the world to be The stretch between Antibes and Nice Airport is, without a doubt, the ugliest section of the Cote d’Azur: on the one side of the road and…
One more reason to hike up to this picturesque hilltop town: a street sculpture exhibition. Street sculpture shows are very much in fashion. Over the last 20 years or so, many towns have hit upon the idea of hosting a festival by inviting artists or museums to exhibit some of their works on public squares…
Picasso spent the last 12 years of his life here, but there are many other reasons to visit this hilltop village north of Cannes. If the French Riviera is not exclusively famous for being a playground of people with more money than sense – from 19th century Russian aristocrats via eccentric East Coast heiresses during…
The Saint Hospice promontory – hermits, shepherds and gazillionaires – is always worth a return visit. It was just a question of time before such a thing would happen, and then, last week, it finally did. She said so: It was St Jean Cap Ferrat all over again “We have been here before.” Mrs. Easy…
