Walk around Cap d'Antibes

We’ve been rather lazy lately when it comes to hiking – so we decided it was about time to get off our bums and get back into it. The fact that the weather was back to normal (blue skies, sunshine) helped ;-). We decided to start off with a nice and easy walk, just to get back into shape a bit – so we decided to do a walk around Cap d’Antibes.

Cap d’Antibes is, as pretty much all places stating with the word “Cap” on the Cote d’Azur are, a place where the rich and the famous live, and others visit. It’s a very pretty peninsula – with a coastal foot path following its rocky coastline.

Thankfully, French legislation says all the coastline is public space – so in theory nobody’s allowed to build on it. And that is, with some exceptions, the case. If it wasn't for the law, I think it’s safe to assume the coastline would be covered with villas (now they’re all about 10 meters from the coastline, behind very high fences)...

Anyway, the walk was a nice enough one, taking us from our parking spot by a beach all the way to the tip of the cape. Actually, we did most of the walk last year already, but weren’t able to go all the way since part of the foot path was closed at the time. Better luck this time. Our walk then took us back past a massive villa (called Chateaux this-or-the-other), though some rather posh residential areas back towards our starting point.

As the weather was very fine indeed, and we were really enjoying ourselves, we decided to make a detour, and walk up to the highest point of Cap d’Antibes, where there’s a nice little (although rather unremarkable) chapel as well as a light house (which is, according to my trusty Michelin guide, one of the most powerful ones on the Mediterranean, with a visibility range of 52 kilometers for sea vessels in clear weather - now that's a useless bit of information for a pub quiz...). We did have very nice views from there back over the Cape and also towards the mainland. A quick decent brought us back to our starting point.