Nice in 2 days, on foot

This 2-day self-guided walking plan for Nice covers 18 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 2 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; Nice rewards a detour.

Day 1

Morning

1. Promenade des Anglais: The palm-lined seafront of Nice, running miles along the Bay of Angels, birthplace of the Riviera holiday, funded by wintering English visitors in 1820, and the daily promenade of the whole city.
2. Hôtel Negresco: The pink-domed Belle Époque palace hotel on the Promenade, all Riviera glamour, with a 16,000-crystal Baccarat chandelier said to have been made for the Tsar, and an owner who filled it with art.
3. Musée Masséna: A dazzling Belle Époque villa on the Promenade, built by descendants of Napoleon's Marshal Masséna, now the museum of the history of Nice, with a free seaside garden of palms out front.
4. Place Masséna: Nice's grand central square: deep-red Turin-style arcades, a giant checkerboard pavement, a marble Apollo once banished as indecent, and seven glowing figures kneeling on masts above the crowds.
5. Promenade du Paillon: Nice's beloved green heart: a park of lawns, trees and fountains laid over a hidden river where a bus station once stood, with a water mirror that erupts in jets for delighted children.

Afternoon

1. Vieux Nice: A warren of ochre lanes and Baroque churches that spent most of its life not French but Savoyard-Italian, with its own dialect, saints and dishes, until Nice was handed to France in 1860.
2. Cours Saleya: The glorious market square of the old town: flowers, fruit and Niçois street food six days a week, antiques on Mondays, overlooked by the top-floor windows where Matisse lived for years.
3. Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate: The Baroque cathedral of Nice, its Genoese tiled dome floating over the old town, dedicated to a teenage martyr whose body, legend says, drifted here in a boat steered by angels.
4. Palais Lascaris: A hidden Baroque palace in the old-town lanes, its grand staircase and frescoed ceilings unchanged since the 1600s, now home to one of France's great collections of historical musical instruments.

Day 2

Morning

1. Colline du Château: The city's green balcony between the old town and the port, with the classic view over the Bay of Angels, a castle-less 'Castle Hill', its fortress blown up by Louis XIV in 1706.
2. Port Lympia: The old working harbour of Nice, its blue basin ringed by tall Italian-red houses, dug from a marsh in the 1740s, and still sending ferries out to Corsica across the sea.
3. Place Garibaldi: Nice's oldest grand square, all Italian-style ochre arcades, honouring native son Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian unification hero who bitterly opposed his home city ever becoming French in 1860.
4. MAMAC: Four white marble-clad towers holding one of France's best collections of playful post-war art, the New Realism born in Nice around Yves Klein, face to face with American Pop Art.
5. Cathédrale Orthodoxe Russe Saint-Nicolas: A Russian cathedral of pink brick and onion domes, improbably risen in Nice, one of the most important Orthodox churches outside Russia, built where a Tsar's heir died in 1865.

Afternoon

1. Musée national Marc Chagall: A museum Chagall planned himself, built to hold his 'Biblical Message', seventeen glowing canvases of Genesis, Exodus and the Song of Songs, with his own blue stained glass in the concert hall.
2. Musée Matisse: The museum of the painter who loved Nice best, in an ochre villa among Cimiez's olive trees, following Matisse from his sunlit Riviera rooms to the radiant cut-outs of his final years.
3. Cimiez: Roman Ruins & Monastery: The hill where Nice began as Roman Cemenelum, a 2,000-year-old arena and baths among the olives, crowned by a Franciscan monastery with Bréa altarpieces, a glorious garden view, and Matisse's grave.
4. Cuisine Niçoise & Socca: The sun-drenched, Italian-tinged food of Nice: crisp chickpea socca from the wood oven, the true no-potato salade niçoise, onion pissaladière, and a chard pie that is, surprisingly, a sweet dessert.

Full Nice guide and all stops →