Tourist Attractions of Cannes

Sightseeing Overview

The long, shop-studded stretch of La Croisette is Cannes’ central attraction, with 12km (7.5 miles) of beach. During the International Film Festival, stars and millionaires, who pose (friment) in restaurants and along the expensive private beaches of La Croisette, become a major attraction. La Croisette is best viewed from the highest point of Cannes’ Old Town, Le Suquet, where the remains of the fortified tower still stand, along with the 12th-century Chapel of St Anne. Le Suquet is a lovely place for tourists to stroll, with its winding streets, small boutiques and restaurants.

At the end of La Croisette is the Palais des Festivals, whose endless Allees des Stars is imprinted with handprints and signatures of the famous. Just beyond, is the atmospheric Vieux Port, with its odd medley of luxury boats and tiny fishing vessels, its rows of palm trees and fragrant flower market of the Allees de la Liberte. Further west, along the seafront, are the free beaches, where the locals gather, along the Plages du Midi.

Passes
The Carte Musee or French Riviera Museum Pass allows free access to 62 of the Riviera’s museums, monuments and gardens including the Musee-Chapelle Bellini, Musee de la Castre, La Malmaison and Musee de la Mer. A three-day pass costs €15 and a seven-day pass costs €25. The card is available at participating museums, monuments and gardens, tourist offices, selected branches of Thomas Cook (Nice and Cannes) and FNAC department stores.

Key Attractions:

Musee de la Castre (Castre Musuem)

The Castre Museum, on the hilltop of Le Suquet, is housed in the former chateau of the monks of the Lerins Isles and the 12th-century chapel of St Anne. Nineteenth-century paintings by local artists depict images of Cannes under rosy skies, with palm trees, fishing boats and ladies in voluminous skirts. There is also a fascinating collection of 200 musical instruments, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities and an ethnology display. Guided tours in English are available on request.
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Languages in Cannes

Nowadays, most Cannois speak French with a lilting southern accent. However, the
inhabitants of Cannes spoke Cannois, a variant of Provençal-Maritime until 1914, when the language was banned to promote the speaking of French. 95% of place names in Cannes derive from this branch of Provençal, the language of southern France.

Suquet means ‘hill-top’ in Cannois and Forville means outside the town. To hear Cannois nowadays, one needs to listen to the small fishing community at the Vieux Port and the boules players at the Allees de la Liberte who call boules ‘bocho’ and the jack ‘boulien’; ‘au revoir’ becomes ‘a si reveire’ and ‘adieu’ ‘adessias’.

Transportation in Cannes

Cannes lies on the main rail line from Italy to Marseille and is well served by the TGV, interregional, and regional trains. The SNCF station is close to the centre; buses leave from both here and the Hotel de Ville.

The town center is served by an electric bus system - the E-LO - whilst an open top beachside bus service links the Hotel de Ville and the Palm Beach Casino.

Cannes is located about 25km west of Nice, and easily reachable by bus from Nice’s international airport. Shuttles run every half hour from 8am through 8pm (hourly early in the morning and after 6pm). The ride takes approximately 30 minutes. Taxi rides from the airport cost 60 euros one way.

Culture of Cannes

Between Festivals and major events, Cannes lives to the beat of the arts year around, thanks to the many organizations contributing to its reputation and teaching. Cannes Municipal Music and Drama Conservatoire promote the awakening and introduction to music since the age of three years old for viola, violin and cello students and since five years old for those registered to musical awakening.

The main cultural event is the International Film Festival, which was first planned for 1939, cancelled because of the outbreak of war and then rescheduled for 1946. The festival gradually grew in size and importance, with the participation in the 1950s and 60s of Cocteau, Bardot, Truffaut and Goddard and the addition of the International Film Market, International Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight. By the 1970s, the festival had become big business, as important for networking as for awarding the prizes, including the prestigious Palme d’Or, and increasingly presenting mainstream Hollywood films. Roman Polanski picked up the coveted prize in 2002, for his directorial return for The Pianist, a holocaust tale of a Polish pianist who escapes a Nazi death camp with the aid of a German officer.

For ticket reservation contact Palais des Festivals for reduced prices for groups. Tickets for general cultural performance and events in Cannes are available at the venue, online or from FNAC, 83 rue d’Antibes . The monthly French-only publication, Le Mois a Cannes, available from the Cannes Tourist Office, provides cultural listings. Listings are also available online .

Music: During the Musical Nights of Le Suquet, international orchestras perform in the Palais des Festivals, Esplanade Georges Pompidou, and chamber orchestras play on the steps of Notre Dame de l’Esperance in Le Suquet. Leading orchestras present during the festival, such as the Cannes Provence Alpes Cote d’Azur Regional Orchestra. Others perform throughout the year, most notably during the biennial International Classical Music Festival. Other principal venues include the Theatre Debussy, in the Palais des Festivals, and the Theatre Palais Croisette in the Hotel Noga Hilton, 50 boulevard de la Croisette. MIDEM (International Market for Records and Music Publishing) programmes jazz, classical and contemporary concerts in January.

Theatre: During the International Actors’ Performance Festival, small venues are used to stage humorous sketches, which can be enjoyed over a drink. Productions are often performed in the Espace Miramar, on the corner of La Croisette and rue Pasteur and the smaller theatre Alexandre III, 19 boulevard Alexandre III . Actors training at the prestigious theatre school, ERAC (Cannes’ Regional Actors’ School), put on regular productions.
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History of Cannes

In the Middle Ages Cannes was a feudal depency of the Lerins monastery. Until the early 19th century, Cannes it remained a small agricultural and fishing village with the highest density of population on Le Suquet hill. Beginning in the 1830s, foreign and French aristocrats built vacation homes in the area, gradually turning Cannes into a resort town.

The man responsible for Cannes’ growth is Lord Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868). A respected and talented British politician in his time, he discovered Cannes in 1834 on his way to Italy. Having bought land to the west of the Suquet hill, now the entrance to the city, Brougham used his many contacts in French politics to help develop the French Riviera.

Invasions, conquests and uprisings punctuate the history of Cannes, which before the 19th century was nothing more than a simple Mediterranean fishing village. The arrival of Lord Brougham in 1834, prompting an influx of British and Russian aristocrats wishing to take advantage of the town’s warm winter climate, brought the town the fame and fortune it enjoys today. Ever thriving, Cannes has played host to the renowned International Film Festival since 1946, and is now the choice location for staging many a prestigious event.

The first apparent civilization to inhabit Cannes dates right back to the 2nd century BC, when today’s movie-star playground was settled by the Oxybian tribe from Liguria - an arm of the Mediterranean conquered by Rome in 14 BC - bearing the name Aegitna. At this time, Aegitna was a poor and simple fishing village that served as a stopping point between the Lerins Islands (around 1km southeast of Cannes) and dry land. Life in Aegitna was idyllically uneventful until the bloody battle between the troops of Othos and Vitellius in the year 69 AD, each aspiring to the power of the Roman emperor. The era of conquest thus began and it was not until the 9th century that the wave of brutal foreign invasions ceased.

In the 10th century, the village fell under the sway of the Abbaye de Lerins (Lerins Abbey, founded in the 5th century). Once the invaders had been expelled, the Counts of Provence actually handed over the small edifice crowning the summit of Le Suquet hill (the old town district of present-day Cannes) to the abbot, exempting him from taxation and making him ruler. To better defend the village, the monks built a fortified castle on this site - the Chateau de la Castre (now home to the museum of the same name), and the village rallied around it. It was also during this period that the siege tower of Ile St Honorat and the great tower of Cannes were constructed. Then, in 1035, the name “Cannes” appeared for the first time in official documentation. Various theories about the origins of Cannes’ name have been proposed, the most plausible of which is perhaps that the town was named after the abundant reeds (cannae) which surrounded the early settlement.

Come the 14th-century, the Plague was rife in the region, closely followed by a bout of pirating and bandit invasions. But thanks in part to the abbey’s benevolent protection of town and townsfolk, Cannes survived. Plague struck again in the 16th century, this time even more deadly than the first, and from this point on, the history of Cannes gradually blended into the broader history of the Provençal region to which it belongs, and which was itself in the process of annexation by France. With this, the influence of Lerins began to wane. (more…)

Demographics of Cannes

Population of the city (commune) of Cannes at the 1999 census was 67,304 inhabitants (69,700 inhabitants as of February 2004 estimates). Cannes is part of the Nice metropolitan area (aire urbaine) whose total population was 933,080 inhabitants at the 1999 census.