Five-star hotels in Nice: the Promenade des Anglais and beyond

A winter resort that became a World Heritage city

Nice was shaped by foreigners who came to spend the winter by the Mediterranean. Since July 2021 the city has been on UNESCO's World Heritage List as a Riviera winter resort town, recognised for a townscape formed from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century by cosmopolitan winter visitors.

The listed area covers 522 hectares. It takes in the whole coastline from the Promenade des Anglais to Mont Boron, Place Masséna, the Colline du Château and the Terrasses des Ponchettes, the Libération district around the Gare du Sud, and the gardens of the Cimiez hills. That map doubles as a guide to where a five-star stay can be based: on the seafront, beside the old town, or higher up among villas and gardens.

The sea in front of it all is the Baie des Anges, which runs for up to 20 km between Antibes in the west and Nice in the east. One explanation of the name points to the angel sharks that local fishermen used to find in their nets; another, to a legend that angels brought the boat carrying the body of Saint Réparate to this shore.

The Promenade des Anglais

The Promenade des Anglais runs for almost 7 km along the Baie des Anges, from Nice Côte d'Azur Airport in the west to the Quai des États-Unis in the east. Its story began in the early 1820s, when English winter residents proposed giving work to local people after a harsh winter by building a walkway along the sea. The path was built between 1822 and 1824 and funded by the Reverend Lewis Way and members of Holy Trinity, the Anglican church in Nice. Speakers of Niçard first called it the Camin deis Anglés, the English Way, and the French name took hold after Nice was annexed by France in 1860.

Today it is lined with palm trees, beaches and the famous blue chairs turned towards the bay. A few of the great seafront villas survive. The Villa Masséna was built between 1898 and 1901 by the Danish architect Hans-Georg Tersling for Victor Masséna, Prince of Essling, and is one of the last 19th-century prestige villas on the Promenade. It now houses a municipal museum, reopened on 1 March 2008 after several years of restoration.

The listed hotel is the Villa Masséna's next-door neighbour. From here the Promenade gives a continuous seafront walk east towards the old town or west towards the airport, with the beach across the road.

The Negresco, a palace facing the bay

The Negresco stands at 37 Promenade des Anglais, facing the Baie des Anges. It opened on 4 January 1913 on the initiative of Henri Negrescu, a Romanian who had spent years as a maître d'hôtel in luxury hotels across Europe. The architect Édouard-Jean Niermans designed the building and its pink dome, and the façade is Beaux-Arts: Neoclassical columns and triglyphs combined with Rococo medallions, bull's-eye windows and garlands. The building served as a hospital during the First World War and was listed as a historic monument in 1975.

The Augier family bought the hotel in 1957, and Jeanne Augier presided over it until 2019, turning it into what the hotel calls a living museum. The collection now numbers more than 6,000 artworks from the 17th to the 20th centuries; in the Salon Royal, Niki de Saint Phalle's Nana Jaune stands among seven contemporary rugs made by Raymond Moretti. The hotel belongs to FDMAN, the endowment fund Jeanne Augier set up in 2009. The upper façade and the four fire pots on the central pavilion were restored in 2022, and the building's restoration was completed in January 2026, when the Belle Époque statues first installed in 1913 returned to the façade.

The Atout France register records 128 rooms, and the current five-star classification dates from 16 May 2024. Rooms range from 25 m² Supérieure rooms facing the interior façade to 30 m² Deluxe sea-view rooms and Rivoli rooms over the garden of the Palais Masséna; the 63 m² family suites have two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and La Suite des Anges sits under the dome. Chef Virginie Basselot, Meilleur Ouvrier de France, oversees Le Chantecler, the hotel's MICHELIN-starred restaurant as presented by the hotel in 2026, and La Rotonde, a south-facing brasserie. N Le Spa has a naturally lit pool, and N La Plage is the hotel's own beach on the bay.

Vieux-Nice, Castle Hill and the port

East of the Promenade, Vieux-Nice fills the ground between the covered course of the Paillon to the west and the Colline du Château to the east. Its main pedestrian street is the Cours Saleya, parallel to the Quai des États-Unis. On 22 July 1861 the town council approved the creation of the city's first flower, fruit and vegetable market there. A few lanes inland, Place Rossetti is the centre of the visitors' old town. The old town's cathedral, Sainte-Réparate, was built in its main part between 1650 and 1685, under a dome clad in glazed tiles in the Genoese manner.

Castle Hill rises directly behind the old town. Its park is crowned by a waterfall built in 1885 as the final flourish of 19th-century landscaping and fed by the Vésubie canal, with views over the city, the Baie des Anges and the port.

On the far side of the hill lies Port Lympia. King Charles-Emmanuel III decided to build a new port in 1748, and the first caisson of the outer breakwater was sunk on 22 July 1750. The name comes from the Lympia spring, which once fed a small lake in the marshland here. Tram line 2 runs to Port Lympia, which gives the port district a direct line to the airport.

The hills: Cimiez and Mont Boron

The hills offer a different Nice from the seafront. Cimiez, an upper-class residential district in the hills, is built over the ruins of Cemenelum, the capital of the Roman province of the Alpes Maritimae; the remains include an arena, thermal baths and a palaeo-Christian basilica. The Musée Matisse occupies a fully renovated Genoese villa in the olive grove of the Cimiez gardens, at 164 avenue des Arènes de Cimiez. Matisse lived in Nice from 1917 until his death in 1954, and the collection of nearly 600 works follows his research from the 1890s to the cut-outs of his last years. He is buried in the cemetery beside the Cimiez monastery, whose church has been used by Franciscan friars since the 16th century.

Mont Boron closes the city to the east, beyond the port. It rises to 191 m, and its 57-hectare forest is the main park of eastern Nice, with views over the city, the harbour of Villefranche-sur-Mer and Cap Ferrat. The Fort du Mont-Alban was built there between 1557 and 1560 under Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy to guard Nice against invasion. The hill is also a residential district of villas, and the three Corniches, the coast roads to Menton, start from Port Lympia at its foot.

Luxury hotels in Nice: choosing an area

Where to stay in Nice depends on what the trip is for. The seafront gives you the sea and the Promenade outside the door; Vieux-Nice and the port put markets, churches and restaurants within walking distance; Cimiez and Mont Boron trade the beach for gardens, museums and views. The listed five-star hotel sits on the Promenade itself. For a wider method of weighing location against the hotel itself, read our guide to choosing a five-star hotel for a city break.

Arriving: the airport, tram line 2 and the coast railway

Nice Côte d'Azur Airport lies about 7 km west of the city centre and is the third busiest airport in France. Tram line 2 runs from Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 to the Jean Médecin stop in the city centre and on to Port Lympia; the airport operator puts the journey at less than 30 minutes, with a tram every 7 to 8 minutes on weekdays. The line is 11.3 km long, and 3.2 km of it runs underground near the centre. Nice-Saint-Augustin railway station, about ten minutes' walk from the airport, connects with tram lines 2 and 3 at the Grand Arénas stop, and intercity bus 80 leaves from both terminals for Monaco and Menton.

Eastbound, the coast railway from Nice-Ville has stations at Nice-Riquier, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Èze-sur-Mer, Cap-d'Ail, Monaco-Monte-Carlo, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Carnolès, Menton and Menton-Garavan before Ventimiglia in Italy. That line makes the eastern Riviera easy to explore from a Nice base: the Belle Époque resort of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, the gardens of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and the border town of Menton. For the whole coast, see our five-star hotels on the French Riviera.

When to go: jazz, beach season and winter light

Summer is the beach season in Nice: the Negresco's N La Plage and its restaurant open from May to September. In 2026 the Nice Jazz Fest took over Place Masséna and the Théâtre de Verdure from 23 to 25 July.

Winter is the season that made the city: UNESCO's listing rests on two centuries of winter visitors, and their villas, gardens and promenades are still the backbone of a stay out of season. The Negresco's La Rotonde keeps its terrace over the Mediterranean open all year. February brings the Carnival, covered in the questions below.