No matter where your personal preferences may lie, the French Riviera is a great area for hiking. There are short and dramatic trails as well as long and epic ones, trails through lush coastal scenery as well as through lunar landscapes higher up the mountains.
There is, however, one type of walk that is nearly absent: the bread-and-butter, steady-Eddy walk that dawdles for dozens of kilometres through a mainly flat countryside.
Just the type of trail which is so beloved by easy hikers everywhere because it politely refrains from reminding them of their advancing years and/or the decline of their physical fitness.
Hiking in Cannes on its flat countryside
The trail for hiking in Cannes starts at the bottom of the Rue de l’Observatoire, but the trailhead is difficult to reach by public transport, so it may be easier to proceed to the Walking Path Access Point about one kilometre further to the north by taking bus no. 9 from Cannes train station and getting off at the stop called Beausoleil.)
After several years, however, we have now stumbled upon one such trail: the route along the Canal de la Siagne in the northern suburbs of Cannes.
While this trail is new – it only opened in 2013 – the history of the Canal itself goes back to the 1860s, a period when the towns along the Riviera grew rapidly. Cannes doubled its size from 1850 to 1950 roughly every 25 years.
And when rising numbers of inhabitants and tourists forced municipal administrations all along the coast to develop new sources of drinking water, they did so mainly by tapping the relatively rich natural water reservoirs higher up the mountains.
In Cannes, a consortium which planned to reroute the waters of the river Siagne was led by Lord Brougham, a former British Lord Chancellor and for all practical purposes the father of the modern Cannes.
When the project was completed in 1868, the then-90-year-old Lord commented that, “after more than 30 years on the French Riviera, there finally is clean water for my tea“. (Lord Brougham, after all, had served in the government of Earl Grey.)
The canal still exists, but for its coastal section – from Mougins through Cannes and its suburbs – now runs underground, covered by a walkway called the Promenade du Belvedere.
This stretch is the first stage of the Canal Walk which leads – over a total distance of 42 km – all the way from the coast to the town of Saint Cezaire, north of Grasse.
The walk to Saint Cesaire continues on your left hand side, but we suggest you turn right first. The short stretch of the path between here and the start is in many ways its most attractive section, featuring splendid views over downtown Cannes and the bay across to Mandelieu and beyond.
When hiking in Cannes, you will be walking through a lush and green scenery, which is more reminiscent of Central European forests than of Mediterranean landscapes …
… and which is crowned by another great view to the islands of Lerin.
While you walk back to the Access Point (this will take you only 15 minutes or so), you will also get a better view of a magnificent villa which is easy to miss on the way in and which seems to have been abandoned for some mysterious reason (I bet that house has some story to tell).
Continue on the other side of the Access Point, up the gravel path.
The Belvedere is the oldest section of the Siagne trail. Other sections, meanwhile, are still under development: about 90% of the trail are by now fully operational, but some sections – including the stretch from Le Cannet to Mougins just outside Cannes – run across private land, so detours and underpasses must be arranged.
The Parc Intercommunal du Canal de la Siagne, a project that involves a total of eight municipalities, will be fully completed in 2023. By then, the entire route will be lined by kilometer markings and info panels with historical pictures …
… which are, in fact, the only place on the first third of the trail where you can actually see the canal (i.e. on a photo). I knew what to expect but still found the experience a little odd.
Once you have crossed the city limits while hiking in Cannes, you can continue along the trail for as long as you like: to Le Cannet and beyond, although the Belvedere is (“officially”) over at its juncture with the Avenue de Ziem.
So for how long should you walk on? We breached the general topic of when to stop on his type of trail two weeks ago, and I did not expect it to pop up again quite so soon.
But here it goes: generally speaking, you will find that the law of diminishing returns is in operation here. If you have gathered sufficient evidence for you to confidently assume that the trail is not going to change dramatically and that it will deliver only more of the same, the argument in favour of going home becomes stronger with every twist of the road.
Ultimately, at any rate, the call is yours to make and yours alone. Never forget that you are doing this for your own amusement and benefit only.
There are no prizes for finishing a stage, and no hiking gods will punish you if you call it a day without having reached the point of total physical exhaustion.
In this particular case, you may also want to take into account the following: buses circulate frequently from Le Cannet to Cannes train station (line no. 1 departs roughly every 15 minutes all days of the week incl. Sundays), so if you continue to Le Cannet, you will at least be certain that you can catch a ride.
Breaking up early represents more of a risk: you will need to look for a bus on the suburban downhill slopes on your left, but some of the lines that crisscross the area only do so 5 or 6 days a week.
On top of that, some services are so infrequent that you might as well walk all the way to town if you have just missed one (count about 1 hour for the walk back to Cannes town centre).
The Siagne trail is said to have a different character further “upstream”, if that is the right word, in the direction of Grasse and Saint Cezaire. We will certainly put that to the test by returning in the not too distant future.
