Provence & the Carnival of Nice

It all begins with a battle of flowers. In 1876 the poet Alphonse Karr, in love with his gardens, imagined a procession in which fragrant bouquets were thrown instead of confetti: thus was born the Bataille de Fleurs, the tender heart of the Carnival of Nice. Today it is a river of floats, mimosa and roses hurled into the crowd, watched over by enormous papier-mâché "grosses têtes" that mock the powerful of the moment. The modern carnival has paraded along the Promenade des Anglais since 1873 and draws almost a million people: our tour leads take you where the festival still has a soul, between the sly sarcasm of the Niçois and the smell of freshly griddled socca.

Then you climb, and the Côte d'Azur reveals its suspended villages. At Èze — the "eagle's nest" at 429 metres above the sea — you walk the Chemin de Nietzsche, the very path the philosopher trod while conceiving "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", until at the top a garden of cacti opens onto the blue void as far as Saint-Tropez. At Saint-Paul-de-Vence, within the walls, you understand why Chagall chose to live here from 1966 until the end: we stop you before his simple tomb, in the little cemetery overlooking the valley, before climbing to the Fondation Maeght, the modern art museum that André Malraux inaugurated in 1964 among pines and Giacometti sculptures.

Beyond the coast, in the Luberon, Provence becomes earth and colour. At Roussillon the village is built from the same red stone as its quarries: the Sentier des Ocres winds among cliffs that shift from yellow to copper with every change of light, dug from one of the largest ochre deposits in the world. Not far away, below Gordes, the Abbey of Sénanque — founded in 1148 and still home to a few Cistercian monks — floats upon a sea of lavender in the last weeks of June. Here our tour leads' tales speak not of monuments, but of pigments, of silence and of a scent that stays with you.