Montfleury

Highlights: Parc Montfleury · Tennis Montfleury · Jardin Michèle Mercier · Piscine Montfleury · Avenue Beauséjour · Résidence Montfleury

A few minutes' walk from La Croisette, on the slopes that rise gently above the bay, Montfleury has cultivated for more than a century an elegance all its own: that of discreet retreats rather than glitter. A neighbourhood of villas, gardens and grand Belle Époque hotels, it embodies another face of Cannes, greener and more intimate, where the Riviera art of living is savoured far from the bustle of the seafront.

At the roots of a name of flowers

When Lord Brougham launched the fashion for winter sojourns on this coast in 1834, a coast still turned towards fishing and trade with the îles de Lérins, the English and then Russian aristocracy set out in search of sheltered hills on which to build their villas. The slopes that rise gently above the bay, behind the future boulevard de la Croisette, offered precisely what these winter visitors sought: generous sunshine, views over the sea and the islands, and a relief soft enough to accommodate vast gardens sheltered from the sea wind. It was on these heights that the neighbourhood of Montfleury took shape.

In 1877, the architects James Warnery and Léon Le Bel raised there the hôtel Montfleury, a vast establishment in the eclectic architecture typical of the Belle Époque, set within a two-hectare park planted with exotic species. An eastern wing completed the ensemble around 1910. This hotel became one of the anchor points of the emerging neighbourhood, drawing an international clientele who came to spend the winter on the Côte d'Azur, mirroring what the grand hotels of La Croisette were experiencing at the same moment.

Villas and gardens, the Belle Époque imprint

Around the hotel, the neighbourhood gradually filled with opulent villas of finely wrought façades, encircled by private parks where palm trees, umbrella pines and Mediterranean species grew. This urbanisation through winter retreats, typical of Belle Époque Cannes, traced quiet, tree-lined streets away from the movement of the seafront, where each residence seemed to wish to preserve its privacy behind a gate and a curtain of greenery.

The avenue Beauséjour and the surrounding streets still preserve today this layout inherited from the nineteenth century: a residential setting, airy, conceived for rest rather than for spectacle. It is this vocation, more intimate than fashionable, that distinguishes Montfleury from the more flamboyant neighbourhoods of La Croisette and made it, from the very beginning, a place of residence as much as of holiday retreat.

A neighbourhood touched by history

Montfleury also carries the memory of a darker period. After the occupation of the Italian zone of the Alpes-Maritimes by German troops in September 1943, the villa Montfleury became the headquarters of the Cannes Gestapo; its cellars were turned into cells where members of the Resistance and civilians were held and interrogated. On 15 August 1944, the day of the Allied landings in Provence, several prisoners were executed there before the retreat of the occupying forces. Cannes was liberated a few days later. A memorial stone recalls today, on the site, the memory of these victims recognised as having died for France.

The neighbourhood also has a lighter history, that of sport: from 1962, the Lucien Barrière group opened at the foot of Montfleury a swimming pool that became a renowned training centre, notably shaping the swimmer Pierre Andraca, one of the best French competitors in the 400-metre freestyle at the end of the 1970s. Nearby, the clay courts perpetuate the tennis tradition that Cannes has made its speciality since the Belle Époque.

From the grand hotel to the contemporary park

The turn of the 1970s marked a break for the neighbourhood. In 1973, the hôtel Montfleury and the neighbouring villa Germania were demolished to make way for a residential development of more modern design, the Résidence Montfleury, drawn by the architects Eugène Lizero and Roger Taillebert: a hexagonal-plan complex, in concrete, whose ribbon balconies are arranged around the former park, redesigned as terraced gardens surrounding a swimming pool.

The municipal pool, for its part, went through a more uncertain period: years of closure tied to land disputes kept it for a time out of the daily life of the people of Cannes, before its reopening in 2013 in an entirely renovated form, with a covered-and-openable sports basin and a learner pool. The parc Montfleury as a whole has since been the subject of a renovation programme that reaffirmed its vocation as the green and sporting lung of the town centre.

Living in Montfleury today

Today, the parc Montfleury brings together in a single place the swimming pool, seven tennis courts, a play area, a pétanque ground and the jardin Michèle Mercier, six thousand five hundred square metres of greenery open to all. Around it, the old villas stand alongside more recent upmarket buildings, within a residential fabric that has remained faithful to its original vocation: to offer, a stone's throw from the centre, a quiet and verdant setting for living.

It is this rare proximity that makes the charm of Montfleury today: La Croisette, the Palais des Festivals and the beaches are reached within a few minutes' walk, while the gardens, the Belle Époque façades and the silence of the streets compose another tempo, more intimate. To live in Montfleury is to choose this unemphatic elegance, made of preserved gardens and discretion, that has always distinguished this side of Cannes.