Plage de la Croisette

The Croisette runs along Cannes's seafront for two kilometres, a promenade of palms and hotels with a line of beaches below it, almost every metre of which is a licensed concession.

None of it is natural. The Riviera's coast is shingle, and Cannes has imported and replenished sand along this front since the interwar period; the beach is engineered, groyned and rebuilt, and the city's coastal works continue. That is not a criticism of the place so much as the fact that explains it — the Croisette is a manufactured amenity, built to serve the hotels that face it.

The concession system dates to the 1920s and 1930s and is the reason the beach looks as it does: numbered mattresses in rows, each block run by a hotel or a restaurant, with narrow free public sections between them that are legally required and considerably busier. Prices in May, during the film festival, are of a different order from prices in September. The promenade was laid out in the 1860s along the line of a path used by pilgrims crossing to the Lérins islands.

The water is sheltered Mediterranean, calm and shallow with a gradual entry, warm from June to October. The Îles de Lérins, twenty minutes offshore, hold a monastery that has been continuously occupied since the fifth century and a fort where the Man in the Iron Mask was held. Plage du Midi west of the port is the free municipal beach the town itself uses, and Théoule and the Estérel further west have red porphyry rock instead of imported sand.

Imported sand, numbered mattresses and a concession system a century old. La Croisette is a manufactured amenity built to serve the hotels behind it, and it does that job well. Swim, watch, take the boat to the Lérins islands and see a monastery that has been occupied since the fifth century, which is the oldest thing in Cannes by a wide margin.