Nice
"It took exactly one plate of socca for Nice to stop being a stopover and become the reason we came back."
The unofficial capital of the Côte d'Azur, where the Promenade des Anglais runs for miles along a pebble beach and the old town smells permanently of frying socca.
We landed in Nice meaning to use it as a base for day trips along the coast and ended up barely leaving. The Promenade des Anglais curves for seven kilometres along the Baie des Anges, wide enough for cyclists, joggers, and elderly couples doing their evening constitutional all at once, and it does something no other seafront we’d seen manages — it makes a city of 340,000 people feel unhurried.
A beach with no sand and no complaints
The beach in Nice is famously pebbles, not sand, and the first afternoon we spent picking our way across them barefoot, wincing, convinced we’d made a mistake choosing this city over somewhere softer. By the third day we understood the trade: the water off a pebble beach stays glass-clear because there’s no sand to cloud it, and we swam in some of the cleanest water we found anywhere on the coast, the whole bay curving away toward Cap Ferrat in one long blue arc.
Vieux Nice and the chickpea flour cult
The old town is a tight grid of ochre and salmon-coloured buildings behind the Cours Saleya flower and produce market, and it runs on socca — a thin, blistered pancake of chickpea flour, olive oil, and salt, cooked in enormous copper pans over wood fire and sold in greasy paper cones by vendors who have clearly been doing this since before either of us was born. We ate our first portion standing in an alley off the Rue Pairolière, burned our mouths, and went back for a second before we’d finished the first.
When to go: May and June give you swimmable water and long light before the July-August crowds fill every metre of promenade. Nice Carnival in February is chaos, in the best way, if you time a visit around it.