Riviera Pebbles Blog: Garden Festival tops new 2017 tourism activities

Posted on 18th Apr 2017 in Nice News

Smell the success of the new Cote d'Azur Garden Festival

The Côte d’Azur tourism board have launched a breath-taking array of activities for 2017.

It’s certainly working. The number of selfies snapped at the new #ilovenice sculpture overlooking the Promenade des Anglais is in the hundreds of thousands, with millions more in combined likes, views and shares.

So what’s new this year?

Most dare devil is the €99 speedboat rental outfit in Nice Port. Uniquely, you don’t need a license for these low-power explorer boats. Just pack a bottle of rosé plus a mask and snorkel, then putter through the blue to Villefranche-sur-Mer.

Not far enough? This April sees the relaunch of direct ferry services from Nice to Sardinia. It’s overnight, allowing you do dine on pasta pomodoro and Prosecco before an 8am arrival on Italy’s island of beaches. One-way rides start from €39.

There are cool new ways to see the Cote d’Azur coastline too. Nice Car rents three-wheel cabriolets pre-programmed with art, culture or celebrity itineraries for €70 per half day. Happymoov are part-electric, part-peddle rickshaws that offer bespoke tours of the-sun kissed coast.

Most personable are the network of Nice Greeters. The concept, which started in New York in the 1990s, sees bilingual volunteers show you around their beloved home city. Tips are greatly appreciated.

But the granddaddy of event spectaculars is the Cote d’Azur Garden Festival, which earlier this month kicked off its inaugural show through April 2017.

Like a sunny version of London’s Chelsea Flower Show, the festival will see ten 200m2 pop-up gardens grace city centre parks in Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Menton and Grasse – all locations 20-minutes apart by train.

The gardens are all free to enter. Best of all, venues like Cannes’ Villa Rothschild are rarely open to the public. Like most of the Cote d’Azur gardens, it was created by 19th English century aristocrats who had little else to do but import wacky plant species to Europe’s sunniest corner.

That’s not all. A simultaneous fringe event, the OFF Garden Festival, will see exhibitions and open houses at 60 other public gardens along the French and Italian Rivieras. Some 400,000 extra visitors are expected on the coast during April. That bodes well for new activities in 2018.