Cannes Was a Sleepy Fishing Port Before British Aristocrats and a Film Festival Made It Famous

Cannes was a modest fishing port on the French Riviera until the 1830s, when Lord Brougham, a former Lord Chancellor of Britain, was reportedly turned back from entering Nice because of a cholera scare and stopped in Cannes instead. He liked it enough to build a villa there, and other wintering British aristocrats followed over the following decades, laying the groundwork for the resort town Cannes would become long before cinema had anything to do with it.

The festival that made the red carpet a fixture

The Cannes Film Festival was established in 1946, partly conceived a few years earlier as a response to political interference in Italy's Venice Film Festival, and it has run most years since, growing into one of the most closely watched events on the international film calendar. Its main venue, the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, opened on La Croisette in 1982 and remains the site of the festival's red-carpet steps, the image most associated with Cannes today. It was at the 1955 festival that Grace Kelly, in Cannes for the event, met Prince Rainier III of Monaco, a meeting widely credited with leading to their marriage the following year and to her later life as Princess of Monaco, a short distance up the coast from Cannes itself.

The grand hotels along La Croisette

The Boulevard de la Croisette, Cannes' curved beachfront promenade, is lined with the hotels that have hosted the festival's visitors for generations, among them the Carlton, the Majestic and the Martinez, all built in the grand Riviera hotel style of the early to mid-20th century and still operating as hotels today. Each September, the same stretch of coast hosts the Cannes Yachting Festival, one of Europe's largest in-water boat shows, which extends the town's high-season pattern of visible wealth well beyond the film festival's dates in May.

Traveller tips

• Nice Côte d'Azur Airport, around 30 to 40 minutes by road or rail, is the nearest major airport to Cannes.
• The Palais des Festivals is a public building outside festival dates and can be viewed from La Croisette at any time of year.
• Hotel rates in Cannes rise sharply during the film festival in May and the yachting festival in September; booking well ahead matters more in those windows.
• The old town, Le Suquet, sits on a hill above the modern centre and gives a view back over La Croisette and the bay.