Èze is a medieval village clinging to a rocky peak four hundred metres above the sea, between Nice and Monaco. You can only move around it on foot, through stepped lanes. At the top, the exotic garden of cacti planted on the castle ruins offers one of the widest panoramas on the Mediterranean.
You need the geography to understand Èze. The village is built on an isolated peak, sheer above the sea, where the corniche rises abruptly. Its inhabitants settled there for the same reason they settled everywhere else on this coast: pirates. Since the twelfth century the village has been a cone of tightly packed houses around a castle, with a single fortified gate.
You leave the car below and walk up, because everything is pedestrian. Cobbled lanes a metre wide, vaulted passages, stairways, heavy wooden doors, craft workshops in the cellars. The village is small, half an hour is enough to cross it, and it is heavily restored: some find it too polished, but the whole holds together and the walk is a fine one.
This is what people come for. On the ruins of the castle, razed in 1706 on the orders of Louis XIV, the commune created an exotic garden in 1949, planted with cacti, agaves, aloes and succulents from the Americas and Africa. The contrast between these bristling silhouettes, the castle stone and the blue of the sea four hundred metres below is striking.
Terracotta figures of women, scattered through the garden, answer the plants. But the point is the view: it runs from Cap Ferrat to the Saint-Tropez peninsula and, on a clear day, as far as Corsica. It is one of the widest panoramas on the Mediterranean, and the only place from which you take in the whole Riviera at a glance.
Allow an hour. The garden is charged, open all year, and the entrance is at the top of the village.
For those who want to earn the view, a path links Èze-bord-de-mer to the village in an hour of steep climbing. Nietzsche walked it in the winter of 1883 and said he composed part three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on it. The path carries his name, it is waymarked, it climbs three hundred metres, and you need water and good shoes. Coming down is harder on the knees than going up.
Èze receives a million and a half visitors a year over a few hectares. The consequence is simple: between eleven and five in season, the village is a corridor. Come when the garden opens, or late in the day, once the coaches have gone and the light rakes across the sea.
Èze sits on the moyenne corniche, one of the three roads linking Nice to Monaco. The grande corniche above it is even more spectacular, and the drive is part of the visit. You can carry on to Monaco ten minutes away, or down to the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, twenty minutes below.
This guide is part of the address book of a private estate in Puget-sur-Argens, 70 minutes away, available for weddings and family stays. It is not open to visitors.
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