The places you can actually go.

Two hundred metres from the car park the town stops and you are looking at Nice across the Baie des Anges with nothing to hear but the sea, the wind and the gulls. The path then runs along the rocks below the walls, round the southern tip, to the Eilenroc grounds.

Tirepoil means hair-pull. The tourist office gives the name to the wind that never stops here.

You pass, in order and mostly without seeing them: Château de la Garoupe, built 1907 and hidden behind a high stone wall and its pines; from the belvedere, Château de la Croë, built 1927, for a time the house of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson; and towards the end Villa Eilenroc, built between 1860 and 1867. All three have their own page here. If you are lucky there are dolphins.

The coast was private, and was taken back. At the beginning of the twentieth century the villa owners had occupied and in part privatised this shore. The Littoral Law let the city recover it and open it to the public — which is the whole reason this walk exists, and the reason the great houses on it turn a wall to the road and their best front to a sea you can now stand in front of.

The stretch is a Natura 2000 site — Baie et Cap d’Antibes – îles de Lérins — managed by the Espace Mer et Littoral and the Conservatoire du Littoral. It is protected, and the tourist office asks that it be respected. They also run guided walks on it, in French.

It is not a promenade. Pathways and steps in the steeper parts, uneven rock, and it is closed outright when the weather is bad — gales especially, because the waves reach parts of it and the rock turns slippery at once. Comfortable closed shoes, and check before you set out.

From the Salis car park the route follows the promenade and boulevard James Wyllie past the small port, then turns right on the bend into the Chemin du Calvaire — a stone way climbing a hundred metres through the Garoupe oaks.

The road is named after a man on these walks. James Wyllie bought Eilenroc in 1873 and made its garden famous. You climb his boulevard to look down on his house.

The wood at the top is nine hectares of green oak belonging to the Conservatoire du Littoral, open all year. On the plateau are the chapel of Notre-Dame de la Garoupe, a listed building and still a working church, reopened after two years of restoration and known for the ex-votos left by sailors; a small oratory by Raymond Peynet; a navy semaphore station; and an orientation table that on a clear day reaches from Italy to Cap Camarat, with the snow on the Alps behind and Corsica if you are up early enough.

There is a café behind the chapel, le Bistrot du Curé, under the pines.

You can come down the same way, or by the route du Phare and avenue Aimé Bourreau — there is a stone passage linking the two near the public toilets. Proper shoes; the tourist office rates the whole thing medium.

Once a year it is a race. The Calvaire Antibois runs 10 km from the Ponteil car park, along the coast to the south of the Cap and then over the plateau twice, by the road and by the path. Hence the name.

Gustave Thuret was an algologist, and this was the first privately funded research laboratory in France. From 1857 he and Édouard Bornet ran acclimatisation trials on exotic species here with the Paris Museum, and the work carried on under Charles Naudin and Georges Poirault. The landscape of the Côte d’Azur as you see it — the palms, the eucalypts, the mimosa — is substantially the result.

Two of the walks are named after this garden’s directors. Impasse Charles Naudin, where Villa Romaine and Villa Jumeirah stand, carries the name of Thuret’s successor. Villa Thuret itself is the last stop on walk 5.

Scientists were not the only visitors. In Letters of a Traveller, 1868, George Sand called it the loveliest garden she had ever seen. The villa was bequeathed to the French nation in 1878; the laboratories, herbarium, library and garden are now run by INRAE.

Entry is free for individual visitors. Groups must book — +33 (0)4 92 38 64 70. Closed at weekends and on public holidays, except the Rendez-vous aux Jardins weekend at the start of June and the Journées du Patrimoine weekend in the third week of September, when it opens on the Sunday.

In the 1860s a wealthy Dutchman, Hugh-Hope Loudon, bought scrubland here and built a mansion he called Eilenroc — his wife Cornélie’s name backwards. Six years later, in 1873, it went to James Wyllie, who brought in names like Ringuisen and made the garden something people travelled to see. The boulevard you climb on the Chemin du Calvaire is named after him.

In 1927 an American couple, Mr and Mrs Beaumont, bought it and commissioned the landscape architect Jacques Gréber to redraw the twenty-seven acres. About 1,650 m² was kept back as a kitchen and cutting garden. The Beaumonts’ parties were the ones everyone on the Riviera arrived at in a motor car.

Mrs Beaumont left the property to the town on condition the gardens stayed open to the public, and the town restored the buildings, the furniture and the grounds. It then added a rose garden, in honour of the trade that had made Antibes the rose capital of France; most of the hundreds of varieties in it were bred in the town. In 2000, fifty olive trees were planted for the children born that year, the first step in rebuilding the estate’s olive grove. It has since produced oil.

Ring before you go. The tourist office says so itself — the villa closes for civic use without much notice. +33 (0)4 93 67 74 33. Only the ground floor is shown, and it is accessible to visitors with reduced mobility.

The shore path reaches the grounds at their southern edge, so the garden and the Sentier du Littoral are the same afternoon.

The highest ground on the peninsula, reached by road or by the Chemin du Calvaire. An orientation table explains what you are looking at: in clear weather everything from Italy to Cap Camarat, with snow on the Alps to the north, and Corsica if you are up early enough.

The lighthouse stands at 103 metres. Over 2,300,000 candelas, a beam reaching 60 km at sea and 100 km from the air — one of the most powerful on the Mediterranean coast. It reopened to visitors in 2024.

At its foot is the chapel of Notre-Dame de la Garoupe, a listed building and still a consecrated church, reopened after two years of restoration, with a great many ex-votos left by sailors. Beside it a small oratory by Raymond Peynet — Notre Dame des Amoureux protégeant les foyers — and a French navy semaphore station. Behind the chapel, le Bistrot du Curé does pan bagnat and pissaladière under the pines.

Below, the Garoupe green oak wood runs to nine hectares. It belongs to the Conservatoire du Littoral and is open all year.

Two parks in one. The northern half is a children’s playground, a merry-go-round, a sculpture by Sosno, and benches under pines old enough to have shaded the first summer visitors. Free early-evening concerts — the Jammin’ Summer sessions — are staged there in July.

The southern half, the Pinède Gould, becomes an open-air theatre every July and has been the main stage of Jazz à Juan since 1960. On the footpath alongside it you can find the handprints of the musicians who have played the festival.

It is the green middle of the first walk: the hotels on walk 1 all look out over this stretch of seafront, and the hotels on them are the ones that invented the summer season.

The tower and battery defended and watched this coast from the Revolution into the early 1900s. The building now holds the Posidonia centre — an exhibition on the sea and the coastline — set in a hectare and a half of pines.

Open Tuesday to Saturday, 9.00 to 17.00, closed Sunday and Monday, with longer summer hours from June to September, 9.00 to 18.00 and open on Sundays. Entry is free.

On the name. Generations of guidebooks, maps and signs call this the Musée naval et napoléonien. The regional tourist board now lists it as the Batterie du Graillon — Espace Mer et Littoral, and does not mention the old name at all. If you are looking for the Napoleonic museum, this is the building. Both names are kept here for exactly that reason.