Cannes is thirty-five minutes away by motorway. The Croisette and the Palais des Festivals draw the crowds, but the real Cannes is elsewhere: in the Suquet quarter and its stepped lanes, at the Forville covered market, and on the Lérins islands, fifteen minutes by boat from the old harbour.
You arrive in Cannes and head for the sea. That is a mistake: you should climb. Le Suquet is the Cannes that existed before the cinema, the fishing village built on the hill, its narrow lanes rising to the church of Notre-Dame d'Espérance and the Mont Chevalier tower, an eleventh-century keep overlooking the whole bay. The Musée des Explorations du Monde occupies the former castle of the Lérins monks, and its terrace gives the finest view in town, for next to nothing.
At the foot of Le Suquet, the rue Saint-Antoine is lined with restaurants, often good, sometimes too touristy. A street further on, the quarter simply gets on with its life.
This is where you realise Cannes is a town and not just a set. The Forville covered market, open every morning except Monday, brings together growers from the hinterland, fishmongers from the harbour, cheesemongers and florists. You can eat on the hoof, buy a picnic for the islands, and run into the city's cooks. On Mondays the hall turns into a flea market.
This is the reason to come to Cannes. From the Quai Laubeuf, next to the old harbour, the ferries take a quarter of an hour to Sainte-Marguerite, the larger of the two islands, and a little longer to Saint-Honorat.
Sainte-Marguerite is covered in pine and eucalyptus, ringed by a path that goes round it in two hours, and edged with coves where you swim in water the mainland no longer has. The Fort Royal holds the cell where the Man in the Iron Mask was held for eleven years, and a maritime museum with Roman wrecks found offshore.
Saint-Honorat belongs to a Cistercian abbey, continuously occupied since the fifth century. The monks grow vines and sell their wine. People come for the silence, and the place enforces it: no music, no noisy picnics, no swimwear away from the coves.
Take an early ferry, bring water, and book in summer.
The Croisette takes twenty minutes to walk, long enough to see the grand hotels and the handprints outside the Palais des Festivals. The private beaches along it are expensive and unremarkable. If you have come for a beach, the region has better ones fifteen minutes from where you are staying.
This guide is part of the address book of a private estate in Puget-sur-Argens, 35 minutes away, available for weddings and family stays. It is not open to visitors.
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