The walk from a visitor berth in Port Vauban to the door of the Picasso Museum takes about ten minutes, and along the way you pass through one of the best old towns on the whole coast. That is the case for Antibes as a shore stop in a single sentence. You can step off the boat and be standing in a castle where Picasso painted, having bought your lunch from a market under the ramparts, without ever needing a bus or a taxi.
I rate Antibes higher than most of its Riviera neighbours for exactly this reason. The town wears its history without trying, and the sea is never more than a street away.
From the pontoon to the ramparts
Port Vauban is the largest marina in Europe and the old town sits immediately behind its southern basins, so the geography is on your side. From the visitor pontoons you walk along the harbour, past the fishing boats, and through one of the gates in the old wall. Within a couple of minutes you are under the ramparts with the Mediterranean breaking against them on your left and the warren of the old town climbing on your right.
If you have not been in here before, the approach and the berthing are worth reading up on first. I cover the channel, the depths, the VHF working and what a visitor berth actually costs in my Antibes Port Vauban guide. For the shore excursion itself, all you need is the knowledge that everything below is within easy walking distance of the quay.
The castle where Picasso painted
The Chateau Grimaldi stands on the seaward edge of the old town, on Roman foundations, looking straight out over the water. In 1946 the curator offered Picasso a corner of the half-empty castle to use as a studio. He stayed a few months and painted with a ferocity that surprised even him, then left most of the work to the town. The result is the Musee Picasso, the first museum dedicated to the artist and still one of the few that holds work he made on the spot.
The collection is not huge, which is its strength: you are not trudging through endless rooms, you are looking at a focused body of work made in this building, with the sea that is in the paintings visible through the windows. The terrace alone, with its Germaine Richier sculptures against the blue, is worth the entry.
Admission has run at around 8 euros standard, with a full rate of 12 euros and a reduced rate of 8 euros depending on whether a temporary exhibition is on, and free entry for under-18s. The summer opening, from 15 June to 15 September, is 10am to 6pm, closed Mondays. The rest of the year it splits the day, roughly 10am to 1pm and 2pm to 6pm, Tuesday to Sunday. Give yourself an hour to ninety minutes, and go on the early side to have the terrace to yourself.
The covered market and the smell of the place
Down in the heart of the old town, the Cours Massena holds the Marche Provencal under its long iron roof. This is a daily morning market, open from 6am to 1pm, running until about 1.45pm in July and August, and closed on Mondays outside the summer (from 1 September to 31 May). It is the real working market of the town, not a souvenir stand: flowers, vegetables, the famous local socca pans, candied fruit, olive oil, cheese. I provision here and eat the rest standing up, which is the correct way to handle a slice of socca.
Underneath the market, set into ancient Roman foundations, is the Absinthe Museum, which is really a bar with a cellar and a small collection. It keeps long hours, often 9am to midnight, and it is a curiosity rather than a serious museum, but the cellar setting is genuinely old and the green ritual is fun once.
A town within the town: the Safranier
Climb a few alleys up from the market and you cross into the Commune Libre du Safranier, a self-declared free commune since the 1960s with its own honorary mayor, founded by locals determined to keep the old ways going. It is only a handful of flower-hung lanes, open all year, but it is the quietest and most charming corner of Antibes, well off the main drag. Wander it slowly. There is a small square, a fountain, vines over the doorways, and almost no tourists because almost nobody knows it is there.
The ramparts walk and the cathedral
Antibes kept its sea walls, and the promenade along the top of them, the Promenade de l'Amiral de Grasse, is the best free hour in town. You walk with the old houses on one side and the open Mediterranean on the other, the Cap d'Antibes ahead and the snow on the Alps behind on a clear winter day. The Picasso Museum sits on this same rampart, so you can string the two together.
Tucked into the old town near the castle is the cathedral, the Eglise de l'Immaculee-Conception, with a Romanesque tower that was once a watchtower and a glowing altarpiece by Louis Brea from 1515. It is free to enter and rarely busy. The mix is typical of Antibes: a defensive tower, a Renaissance painting, a modern museum and a working market all within a few hundred metres of each other and of your boat.
If you have children aboard, the Plage de la Gravette right beside the old port is a small, sheltered, sandy cove with shallow water, ideal for a swim between sights. It is one of the few proper sand beaches on this rocky stretch of coast, and it is a two-minute walk from the museum.
A shore day that builds itself
Antibes makes an easy rest day in a cruise, and it slots naturally between the bigger Riviera stops. Crews heading west often pair it with Saint-Tropez ashore a day's sail further on, while those continuing east towards the Italian border usually take in Nice old town from Port Lympia next. The Lerins islands lie just across the bay off Cannes, an easy detour by sea.
My standard day looks like this.
- Morning: the covered market on the Cours Massena, basket in hand, breakfast on socca.
- Late morning: the Picasso Museum at the Chateau Grimaldi, terrace first.
- Lunch: a back-street bistro in the old town rather than the harbour front.
- Afternoon: a slow wander through the Safranier, then a swim from the Plage de la Gravette, the small sheltered beach tucked right beside the old port.
If you have a second day, the Cap d'Antibes peninsula south of the town is laced with a coastal footpath, the sentier de Tirepoil, that runs around the rocks below the grand villas. It starts a bus ride or a long walk from the port and gives you the wild, sea-battered side of a cape that is otherwise hidden behind high hedges and private gates. Pack water and proper shoes; parts of it scramble over bare rock and there is no shade.
There is also a small but good archaeology museum, the Musee d'Archeologie in the Bastion Saint-Andre on the ramparts, telling the story of Antipolis, the Greek and then Roman town that stood here long before the medieval one. Entry is a few euros, and it makes the point that people have been tying up boats in this bay for well over two thousand years. The layers of history here run deep, and you can walk through most of them in an afternoon.
What sets Antibes apart from the showier ports along this coast is how little distance separates the boat from the good stuff. You do not earn the old town with a long trek inland; you simply step off the pontoon and walk through a gate in a 400-year-old wall. For a cruiser who wants a proper town without giving up a sailing day, it is hard to better.
