A five-star hotel in Mougins, the hilltop village above Cannes

A spiral village on the hill

The commune of Mougins covers 25.64 km² north of Cannes and Le Cannet and south of Grasse, rising from 32 to 269 metres, and had 19,782 inhabitants in 2023. Its historic heart is small: a village at the top of the hill, fortified in the Middle Ages and laid out in a spiral, with ramparts, a walkway along them and, originally, three gates. The Porte Sarrazine is the only gate to have survived.

Inside the walls, the church of Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur was begun in the 11th century. A charter of 1438 allowed the people of Mougins to sit as judges in their own commune, and the vaulted room that served as a court in the 15th century is still pointed out on village walks. The Chapelle Saint-Bernardin of the White Penitents dates from 1618, and the lavoir, built in 1894, was used by washerwomen until the 1970s. The village's old mill was turned into a house, and Christian Dior was one of its occupants.

The fountain at the meeting of Avenue de la Victoire and Avenue du Commandant Lamy has stood there since 1894; Commandant Lamy gave his name to Fort-Lamy, today N'Djamena, the capital of Chad. On 2 March 1815 Napoleon and his troops crossed Mougins on the way from Le Cannet to Grasse, a stage of what became the Route Napoléon.

Picasso, Dora Maar and the Vaste Horizon summers

One morning in 1936 Picasso put down his bags at the Vaste Horizon, then a hotel in the village. Between 1936 and 1938 he stayed there with Dora Maar and friends including Man Ray and Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau also came to Mougins. The tourist office's guided tour on Mougins and Picasso opens the room in the former Vaste Horizon where he stayed and shows photographs that Dora Maar and Man Ray took during those summers.

He settled for good in 1961, buying the Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie from Loel Guinness as a wedding gift for his future wife, Jacqueline Roque, and lived there until his death in 1973. The three-hectare estate, on the border between Cannes and Mougins, looks towards the Bay of Cannes and the Estérel. Its oldest element is the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Vie, mentioned in papal documents of 1259, known by its present name since 1656 and protected as a historic monument since 1927. A statue of Picasso stands in the village, in Place Roger Vergé.

The photographer André Villers, a friend of Picasso and his regular photographer, gave his name to the town's photography museum, created in 1986 at the Porte Sarrazine with his portraits of the painter. It closed in 2019 to become the Centre de la Photographie de Mougins, installed in the village's former presbytery and opened in July 2021; its brief is contemporary photography.

FAMM, a museum of women artists

In June 2024 the collector Christian Levett opened FAMM, the Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, at 32 Rue du Commandeur, in the building of the Mougins Museum of Classical Art that he had opened in June 2011. The new museum is given over entirely to women artists.

The display brings together more than 100 works by about 80 artists, from Impressionism through Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism to contemporary art: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Jenny Saville are among the names. Older guides that describe a classical art museum in Mougins refer to the previous institution; Levett sold a significant part of his antiquities collection in 2023 as he turned towards women artists.

Roger Vergé and the table of Mougins

The town's reputation for food owes most to Roger Vergé (1930–2015). With his wife Denise he opened Le Moulin de Mougins in 1969, and his cooking, often called cuisine du soleil, was a variation on Provençal cuisine. The restaurant's closeness to Cannes drew guests from the film festival, and its kitchen trained chefs including Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud and David Bouley. In 1977 Vergé opened a second restaurant, L'Amandier de Mougins, in the old village.

Mougins has built on that legacy. Since 2012 it has held the Ville et Métiers d'Art label for gastronomy, and the old village counts around 40 restaurants alongside its galleries. The regional tourist board notes that the town has several starred restaurants; for what restaurant stars and hotel distinctions do and do not mean, see our guide to MICHELIN Keys, stars and reviews.

Valmasque, Fontmerle and the green side of Mougins

Mougins is nicknamed the garden city, with almost half of the commune given over to green space. The largest piece is the Parc départemental de la Valmasque, a 427-hectare forest park shared with neighbouring communes, 259 hectares of it in Mougins, with a botanical trail that labels the plants growing wild there.

On the edge of the park, the Étang de Fontmerle is a natural pond of about 5 hectares. Its lotus, planted in the 1960s by a former owner, Maurice Gridaine, now form the largest lotus colony in Europe, and more than 70 bird species have been recorded there. Gridaine was a film-set architect credited with the first Palais des Festivals in Cannes, and in 1949 Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais came to see the estate above the pond, when Marcel Pagnol's dream of a cinema city there was briefly revived.

The commune also takes in about 18% of the Sophia Antipolis technology park and two golf courses: the Cannes-Mougins course in the Valmasque forest, originally designed by Harry Colt in 1923, and the Royal Mougins Golf Club.

Mougins hotels: Hôtel Le Mas Candille

Hôtel Le Mas Candille stands on the hill of Mougins, on Boulevard Clément Rebuffel, with views that stretch over the Grasse hinterland. Atout France classified it five-star on 12 July 2024, with 46 rooms on the register. According to its website, the property has been entirely redesigned by the architect Hugo Toro.

The grounds set the tone: a 4-hectare park and two swimming pools. The Glow House Spa by Clarins adds Clarins treatments, a hammam, a sauna, a fitness room and its own 25-metre indoor-outdoor pool, heated all year; the spa and its pool are for adults only. Le POOL, the seasonal poolside restaurant, serves lunch and in summer adds a Sunday-evening grill of whole fish, flame-grilled meats and seasonal vegetables, while Le Candela is the dinner restaurant.

Deluxe Jardin rooms measure 35 m² with a 10 m² balcony, sleep up to three with a 180 cm bed and a 90 cm extra bed, and have a bathroom with both a shower and a bathtub.

Getting to Mougins

Most visitors reach Mougins by road. Nice Côte d'Azur Airport is about 20 minutes away, and Cannes train station about 15 minutes. From the A8 motorway, exit 42, signed Cannes–Mougins, leads to the town, and the RD 6185 continues north to Grasse.

Inside the walls, the village is a place for walking: the tourist office's guided tours follow its narrow streets and squares on foot. The French Riviera collection gathers the five-star stays along the rest of this coast.

From the hill to the coast and the perfume town

A room in one of the Mougins hotels puts the coast and the perfume town within easy reach. Cannes lies 15 minutes down the hill, close enough for an afternoon by the sea or an evening in town. Grasse, 8 km inland along the RD 6185, is the perfume capital, where the rose and jasmine harvests set the calendar.

Further east along the coast lies Antibes, for a seaside day after a morning in the hills.