French Riviera

The Côte d'Azur was a winter resort before it was a summer one. Through the 19th century, the English aristocracy came down for January and February, while hardly anyone came in August; by the 1920s the calendar had flipped, and the Riviera has been the Mediterranean's working summer coast ever since. It runs 115 kilometres from the red porphyry cliffs of the Esterel in the west to the Italian border at Menton in the east, and packs into that distance the most-recognised yachting names in the world: Cannes and the Croisette, Saint-Tropez and the Pampelonne beach clubs, Antibes and Port Vauban, Monaco and Port Hercule.

A typical Riviera day moves between the harbours and the anchorages between them. Most charters anchor at the Lerins, the two small islands fifteen minutes off Cannes, for lunch on board: Saint-Honorat is home to a working Cistercian monastery whose monks have made Lerina liqueur for over a century, while Sainte-Marguerite is forested with Aleppo pine and holds the Fort Royal that once imprisoned the Man in the Iron Mask. The afternoon usually runs along the Esterel cliffs, which turn rust at sundown, and the evening ends stern-to in one of the working harbours, with the quay as the front row for the town.

Anchoring is managed in many of the bays because of Posidonia, the protected seagrass that grows in the shallow water; a good captain books the mooring buoys ahead, so the yacht still spends its nights in the prettier coves rather than the overflow ones. The summer calendar fills around three event weeks: the Cannes Film Festival from 12 to 23 May 2026, the Monaco Grand Prix on 5 to 7 June (a one-off shift from its traditional late-May slot), and the Monaco Yacht Show on 23 to 26 September. Berths for those weeks tend to be booked six to twelve months in advance.