Explorer Cannes

The Palais des Festivals et des Congrès is the convention centre at the western end of the Croisette in Cannes, opened in 1982 to designs by Hubert Bennett and François Druet. It hosts the Cannes Film Festival each May; outside, visitors can climb its 24 red-carpeted steps and follow the Chemin des étoiles, a trail of about 150 film stars' handprints.

The Promenade de la Croisette is the seafront boulevard of Cannes, running about 2.6 km along the bay from the Palais des Festivals to the Pointe de la Croisette. Named after a small cross that once stood on the cape, it has a wide walkway with benches and palm trees between the beaches and hotels such as the Carlton, the Majestic and the Martinez.

The Musée des Explorations du Monde, formerly the Musée de la Castre, occupies the remains of the medieval castle of the Lérins monks at the top of Le Suquet, the old quarter of Cannes. It shows Mediterranean antiquities, art from the Arctic, the Himalayas, Oceania and pre-Columbian America, and 19th-century landscapes; its watchtower can be climbed.

Fort Royal is a 17th-century fortress on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, the largest of the Lérins Islands, reached by boat from Cannes. Its old castle, built over Roman cisterns, houses the Musée du Masque de fer et du Fort Royal, with the cell where the Man in the Iron Mask was held from 1687 to 1698, a Huguenot memorial and finds from shipwrecks.

The Jardin botanique de la Villa Thuret is a 3.5-hectare botanical garden on Cap d'Antibes, created in 1857 by the botanist Gustave Thuret to test exotic plants in the Mediterranean climate. Now run by the research institute INRAE, it holds about 2,500 trees and shrubs from regions such as Australia, South Africa, California and Chile.

Notre Dame de la Garoupe is a chapel on top of the Garoupe plateau on Cap d'Antibes, beside the Garoupe lighthouse. Its two naves hold two statues of the Virgin, one of them Notre-Dame de Bon Port, patron of Antibes sailors, along with about 300 ex-votos from 1506 onwards, frescoes of 1948 and 1953 and a gilded altarpiece of 1710.

The Musée Picasso in Antibes occupies the Château Grimaldi, a castle above the sea on the site of the ancient Greek town of Antipolis. Pablo Picasso used it as a studio in 1946 and left many works made there; renamed after him in 1966, the museum holds about 245 of his works, along with paintings by Nicolas de Staël, Fernand Léger and Hans Hartung.

Antibes Cathedral, also called Notre-Dame-de-la-Platea, is the largest church in Antibes and was the seat of a bishop from the 5th century until 1244. Its façade was rebuilt after the siege of 1746–1747; the carved doors of 1710 show Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian, and inside hangs a Rosary altarpiece painted by Louis Bréa in 1515.

Port Vauban is the harbour of Antibes, a natural anchorage used since Greek and Roman times and fortified in the 1680s by Vauban and his engineer Antoine Niquet. Today it is a marina with about 1,500 berths that takes yachts up to 150 metres long. Its quays run from the walls of the old town to the foot of Fort Carré.

Fort Carré is a 16th-century fort on a 26-metre promontory north of the harbour of Antibes, built under Henry II to watch the border with the Duchy of Savoy. Four arrowhead bastions surround its central Saint-Laurent tower; Vauban strengthened it in the 1680s, and Napoleon Bonaparte was held here for ten days in 1794. Visitors walk its ramparts.