Provence & Nice Carnival

It all begins with a battle of flowers. In 1876 the poet Alphonse Karr, besotted with his gardens, imagined a procession in which people would throw fragrant bouquets instead of confetti: and so the Bataille de Fleurs was born, the tender heart of the Nice Carnival. Today it is a river of floats, mimosa and roses hurled into the crowd, presided over by enormous papier-mâché «grosses têtes» mocking the powerful of the moment. The modern carnival has paraded along the Promenade des Anglais since 1873 and draws nearly a million people: our Furore tour leads take you where the celebration still has a soul, amid the wry sarcasm of the Niçois and the smell of freshly baked socca.

Then you climb, and the Côte d'Azur reveals its suspended villages. In Èze — the «eagle's nest» at 429 metres above the sea — you walk the Chemin de Nietzsche, the very path the philosopher trod while conceiving «Thus Spoke Zarathustra», until at the summit a cactus garden opens onto the blue void stretching all the way to Saint-Tropez. In Saint-Paul-de-Vence, within the walls, you understand why Chagall chose to live here from 1966 until the end: we pause before his simple grave in the small cemetery overlooking the valley, before climbing to the Fondation Maeght, the modern art museum that André Malraux inaugurated in 1964 among pines and Giacometti sculptures.

Beyond the coastal border, in the Luberon, Provence becomes earth and colour. In Roussillon the village is built from the same red stone as its quarries: the Sentier des Ocres winds between cliffs that shift from yellow to copper with every change of light, carved from one of the world's largest ochre deposits. Not far away, below Gordes, the abbey of Sénanque — founded in 1148 and still home to a handful of Cistercian monks — floats on a sea of lavender in the final weeks of June. Here our tour leads speak not of monuments, but of pigments, of silence, and of a scent that stays with you.