Cannes

Cannes doesn't announce itself with a pier — it invites you in gently, by tender, the ship anchored offshore like a patient guest waiting to be welcomed. The moment our small boat rounded the breakwater and I saw the sweep of La Croisette unfurling along the bay — that famous palm-shaded promenade with its art deco hotel palaces gleaming white and cream against the Mediterranean blue — I understood why this town of some 74,000 souls has captured the world's imagination since long before the first Film Festival unfurled its red carpet in 1946.

However, there's a story they tell here, about Lord Brougham, an English traveler quarantined in Cannes in 1834 during a cholera outbreak. He couldn't proceed to Italy as planned, so he stayed. And stayed. And fell so deeply in love with this fishing village that he built a villa and spent every winter here until his death, bringing the British aristocracy in his wake. Cannes owes its transformation from quiet harbor to glittering resort to a man who was forced to stop — and chose to remain. I think about that every time I step off a tender here: sometimes the detours become the destinations.

La Croisette stretches before you like a promise kept. This wasn't always so polished — the promenade took its current form in 1960, when they created the beaches and formalized what had been a casual shoreline into this grand sweep of elegance. I walked it in the early morning, when the palm shadows were still long and cool, past the private clubs with their neat rows of loungers waiting for the day's parade of sunbathers. The hotels — Carlton, Martinez, Majestic — rise like monuments to a more glamorous age, their belle époque facades watching over everything with benevolent grandeur. The Palais des Festivals et des Congrès sits at the heart of the Croisette, a modern building that opened in 1982. This is the beating heart of the Cannes Film Festival, that impossibly glamorous gathering each May that has made this city synonymous with cinema. The handprints of stars are set into the pavement outside — I put my hand in Marion Cotillard's print and felt the strange thrill of touching a place where art and celebrity intersect.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see the Cannes that existed before the cameras arrived, so I climbed west up into Le Suquet, the oldest quarter perched above the Vieux Port. The streets narrow and twist as you ascend, the buildings pressing close in that medieval way, their shutters painted in faded ochres and soft greens. This is 14th-century Cannes, built when the town was more concerned with watching for pirates than premieres. At the summit stands the 12th-century castle — fortified stone walls that now house the Musée de la Castre, with collections ranging from ethnography to antiquities. The views from up here are extraordinary: the bay sweeping east toward Antibes, the Lérins Islands floating offshore, and below, the geometric perfection of modern Cannes laid out like a promise of what prosperity and beauty can build together.

Just beside the castle, I found Notre-Dame d'Espérance, a Gothic church whose name means "Our Lady of Hope." It's a quiet, cool refuge from the glamour below — stone and stained glass, candles flickering in the dimness, the smell of old incense. I sat in a pew and listened to the silence, thinking about how every glittering resort needs its still, sacred places. My eyes welled with unexpected tears in that dim interior — not from sadness, but from the sudden recognition that beauty comes in many forms, some loud and some whispered, and both deserve our attention.

Lunch was salade niçoise and cold rosé at one of the private establishments along La Croisette, with its white umbrellas and attentive service. The water was impossibly clear, that particular Mediterranean blue-green that seems lit from within. I swam out past the roped area and floated on my back, watching the palms sway and the hotel facades gleam, thinking about Lord Brougham and that first reluctant winter he spent here. The salade arrived with perfectly seared tuna, olives from the hills behind Nice, and tomatoes that tasted like summer concentrated. The rosé was pale and dry, tasting of Provence itself. The meal cost €45 but worth every centime for the setting, the service, and the sense of being cared for in this most elegant of places.

In the afternoon, I took the ferry to Île Sainte-Marguerite — just twenty minutes offshore, but a world away from the polished elegance of the mainland. Pine forests, secret coves, the fortress where the Man in the Iron Mask was supposedly imprisoned. I found a hidden inlet and swam in water so still it felt like floating in liquid light. When I looked back toward Cannes, the city shimmered across the water like a mirage, all those art deco dreams and film festival fantasies glowing in the slanting afternoon sun. The contrast is what makes Cannes unforgettable: the glamour and the wildness, the red carpets and the rough stone, the place where cinema met the sea and decided to stay.

I returned to Le Suquet at sunset and stood at the castle ramparts watching the light turn the bay to molten gold. Yachts swayed at anchor, the Croisette glowed amber, and somewhere below me a jazz quartet began playing in a terrace restaurant. I am profoundly grateful for this town's particular magic — not just the famous people who visit each May, but the light, the way the Mediterranean holds Cannes in its ancient blue embrace, and the way a place can be both a stage and a sanctuary, depending on where you choose to look. Sometimes the detours become the destinations, and sometimes the detours become the whole point of the journey.