The Tour de France finishes in Nice this Sunday. It is the first time since its inception in 1903 that the race has finished outside Paris, and the first time since 1989 that the yellow jersey has been decided by a time trial on the final day.
The Tour’s arrival in Nice also coincides with the 200th anniversary of the city’s Promenade des Anglais, the seafront promenade partly funded by English chaplain Lewis Way. The rest of the work on the cobbled Camin dei Ingles, as it was originally known, was paid for by Way’s congregation, with the first section completed in 1824. Two hundred years later, I’m cycling along the rosy-hued promenade with my dog Rio in the front basket, his ears flapping in the sea breeze as we head for the Plage des Chiens, halfway to the airport.
The Tour de France riders will follow the same route, except that they will be cycling against la watch so you won’t get much chance to admire Europe’s largest coastal road. Nor the Belle Epoque masterpieces that race around the headland of Rauba Capeu (‘hat thief’ in English, after the fierce wind) past the pastel-coloured houses of the Quai des États-Unis before sprinting down the Promenade des Anglais.
The first on my right is the Jardin Albert 1er, whose bandstand dates from 1860, the year Nice joined France from the Kingdom of Savoy and Sardinia. Heading west, I pass the white granite Art Deco facade of the Palais de la Méditerranée, built by American billionaire Frank Jay Gould in 1929. It is followed by a row of seaside hotels – the Royal, the Westminster and the West End – before the opulent Villa Masséna, with its collection of Napoleonic memorabilia and tropical gardens.
The energy of Nice can be seen along the Promenade des Anglais. Fireworks displays, street musicians, volleyball and boules courts, Ironmen, marathons and pilou competitions all take place here.
Runners sprint past the Le Negresco hotel, which opened in 1913, a Belle Epoque palace in meringue white with a glass ballroom whose doorman still wears red knickerbockers, blue jackets and plumed hats. The Negresco was a popular meeting place for Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Louis Armstrong; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton stayed there; and the Beatles waved from its balcony when they came to Nice in June 1965. It was also a favourite of the dancer Isadora Duncan, who had a dance studio around the corner and died here on the promenade when her long silk scarf got caught in the wheel of her sports car. A few villas away, No. 54 was the home of Emil Jellinek, who named his car company, Mercedes, after his daughter. Today it is the Mercedes apartment building, which, like its neighbours, was rebuilt in the 1930s and 1940s with Art Deco extensions and balconies with nautical-style ironwork.
On the beach to my left the nautical style continues, with striped parasols, flagpoles, white benches and sea-blue chairs, one row looking out to sea and the other looking out at the roller-skaters, cyclists and promenaders strolling past la Ball.
Most of the dozens of opulent villas that once overlooked the beach here have been demolished and replaced by apartment buildings. One that remains is the neoclassical Villa Furtado-Heine. Built between 1784 and 1787, it was once home to Napoleon’s sister Pauline and is now a home for war veterans, tucked away behind a garden of fig trees, cacti and jacarandas.
A block farther west is the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, an elegant cream-and-terracotta building with white marble steps and a vast auditorium that became a center for intellectual and cultural exchange in 1933. This season’s lectures include “The Love Language of Albert Camus” and “Shostakovich and Stalinist Censorship.”
The Tour de France riders make a U-turn here to return along the promenade and finish at Place Masséna, but my journey to the dog beach continues a few more kilometres, past rows of palm trees and the butterscotch-coloured villa of the Société Centrale d’Agriculture et d’Horticulture, built so local aristocrats could show off the plants they brought back from overseas.
I pass apartment blocks called Bagatelle, L’Elisabeth, Le Margaret and Le Copacabana before reaching my favourite seaside properties, known as the non-identical twins: two side-by-side villas from very different periods. No. 139, Villa Collin de Huovila, was completed in 1911 – an elaborate Art Nouveau masterpiece with a roof in the style of a samurai helmet and decorated with cherubs throwing flowers at a naked caryatid. Next door is Villa Monada, built in white modernist blocks in the 1930s, a cubist mirror image of its eccentric neighbour. Both are still privately owned, but almost everything along the seafront is either apartments or hotels.
In the late 19th century, pavilions were built on the beach where hotel guests could put on their bathing suits. Carpets allowed them to walk unscathed on the pebbles, and since almost no one could swim, they climbed into barrels filled with heated seawater. The promenade now has a two-way cycle path, water fountains, bicycle repair stations and a wide walkway, now secured by bollards and a white steel rope after the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice that killed 86 people. A monument to them, L’Ange de la Baie by Jean-Marie Fondacaro, stands opposite the Palais de la Méditerranée.
The energy of Nice can be seen along the 7 km long Promenade des Anglais. Fireworks shows, street musicians, volleyball and boules courts, Ironmen, marathons and competitions to kiss everything happens here. I cycle past hundreds of joggers, tourists staring at their phones, flaneurs and grandparents pushing strollers to the dog beach, where Rio meets his posse.
When reporter Joseph Roth wrote about Nice for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925, he described the “old ladies, 10 years younger on facials and diets … adorned with incredibly small lap dogs, who talk about the future and not the past, like other ladies elsewhere.” A century later, nothing has changed. Nice’s beaches are packed at dawn with elderly locals swimming in the calm sea, while their dogs, wrapped in the cashmere yellow sweaters they’ve left behind, wait patiently on the shore.
To eat at Le Galet, which serves salade niçoise, seafood, pasta and Mediterranean dishes on the beach
Stay in the West End, one of the coast’s gigantic Belle Epoque hotels (double rooms from €150)
Related: An explosion of colour and life: rediscovering Nice