The Promenade des Anglais in Nice (France) as a prototype of the modern urban recreational path

I spent several days in Nice in late November. I’d been there twice before, in 2008 and in 2014. Like many other people, I find Nice an agreeable place. Its dense central city, its extraordinarily diverse population (which includes visitors from all over the world), the views of the Mediterranean on the south and of Alpine foothills on the north, and the mild climate are all components of Nice’s allure. (I try not to think too much about the fact that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has often done better in Nice than in any other large French city.)

In terms of the themes of this blog, Nice’s Promenade des Anglais is the city’s most distinctive feature. The Promenade is a 7-km-long pedestrian and cycling path that follows the shoreline of the Baie des Anges from Rauba Capeu, a peninsula just southeast of Nice’s central business district, to the city’s airport southwest of the central city. Except on (rare) foggy days, it’s always easy to see from one end of the Promenade to the other. Because the Airport’s runways run more or less parallel to the shoreline, you also get to see airplanes taking off and landing. And, since the Promenade is usually busy, it’s a great place for people-watching. The Promenade des Anglais is certainly one of the world’s most distinctive and enjoyable-to-use urban recreational paths.

In some ways, this path is very much like its counterparts elsewhere. It runs along a body of water. Motor vehicles are forbidden (although scooters do use the bicycle lanes). There’s a daily transformation of the path from a place mostly frequented by more or less serious runners, pedestrians, and cyclists early in the morning to crowds of tourists in the afternoon to a mix of occasionally inebriated revelers on some evenings.  Here are maps.

Map of Nice and vicinity emphasizing pedestrian and cycling facilities and tram lines. The nominal scale of the map is 1:40,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper. GIS data come in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited the data to some extent. Note the extreme contrast in building density between the fairly flat built-up portions of the city and the much more diffuse hilly areas. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

Map of central Nice and vicinity emphasizing pedestrian and cycling facilities and tram lines. The nominal scale of the map is 1:17,500. For information on the map’s sources, see text accompanying previous map.

In other ways, however, the Promenade des Anglais is somewhat different from comparable paths in other cities. In places, it’s much wider than most of the world’s urban recreational paths. For a 375-m stretch near central Nice (just east of the covered-up Paillon River outflow), it’s approximately 25 m wide, including the bicycle lanes. Elsewhere it’s mostly narrower but still wider than similar features in most other cities. It’s 15 or 16 m wide for a 2-km stretch west of the Paillon outflow. West of the Rue Gardon, it’s still 8 m wide. The path does become narrow at both ends, as it circles around Rauba Capeu and approaches the Airport. Here are some photos.

View of the Promenade des Anglais and of Nice’s beachfront looking roughly west from the Colline du Château, which makes up the bulk of the Rauba Capeu. Note the varying widths of the pedestrian/cycling path.

The Promenade des Anglais’s walking and bicycling paths late on a warmish November morning.

The path’s chief claim to fame may be that’s quite old. I can’t prove it, but it’s possible that the Promenade des Anglais has been used more or less continuously for more years than any other urban recreational path in the world.¹ The path opened in 1824 and will thus be two hundred years old in the coming year.

An often-repeated oral history attributes its founding to wealthy expatriate Englishmen who’d been wintering in Nice since the late 18th century. With some help from his countrymen, a Reverend Lewis Way paid for the initial sections. The goal was to create a place for English expatriates to walk along the coast. Construction was also intended to provide transportation and an income for impoverished residents of Nice who’d come to the city as a result of crop failures due to drought. The initial segment was built just west of the then difficult-to-cross Paillon River. The path was gradually widened and extended west as a result of action by the local government, which reported to the Duke of Savoy until 1860. This process took several decades—just as extending pedestrian paths today often does.

Note, however, that I’ve only been in a position to consult secondary sources.² I haven’t been able to locate any period descriptions of how the early path was actually used, but it does seem credible that furnishing English visitors with a place to walk really was a goal. The literature on the history of pedestrian life suggests that numerous well-off Englishmen in the early 19th century did a great deal of walking.³ It’s easy to imagine that the early Promenade des Anglais (originally called the Camin dei Ingles in Nissart, the local Romance language) was used, just like the path today, both for recreational walking and for commuting along the beachfront.

The coming of French rule in 1860 was, eventually, associated with a substantial increase in the path’s length, width, and pavement quality.⁴ 1870s photographs reveal that there was a division between a pedestrian path and a path for horses and horse-drawn vehicles.⁵ The paths were at least partly paved around 1880.⁶ The building of a bridge (the Pont des Anges) over the Paillon River in 1890 allowed the path to be extended east. Things didn’t change radically after motorcars came along in the 1890s. Motorcars just used the former horse path.

The Promenade des Anglais took something like its present form in the 1930s, when Mayor Jean Médecin ordered improvements in both the pedestrian path and the path for motor vehicles. The former was extended out onto the beach and was put on a kind of dyke. A beachside wall was added to keep out waves that could strike during storms. The adjoining roadway became a four- or five-lane arterial with a median. It’s often described as a kind of early freeway, but it wasn’t really; there were (and are) traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. Numerous photographs from the 1920s suggest that the pedestrian path was heavily used despite the arrival of the automobile. But users in those days were definitely not for the most part obsessive exercisers. The photos show crowds of people watching events or mingling near Nice’s CBD. It was not until the last third of the 20th century (or even later) that running, bicycling, and walking for exercise came to be important for large numbers of people in France and other Western countries and the Promenade des Anglais came once again to be used in ways that would presumably have been somewhat familiar to the English expatriates who built the original path.

There have been additional changes in more recent years. In 2020, the parallel roadway’s eastern sections were put on a diet; only a one-way single lane remains. The separate bicycle path, established some years ago, was extended to the Airport in 2022.⁷ More recently, a fatal accident stimulated authorities to add pedestrian crosswalks at frequent intervals along the bicycle path; there is some question as to whether these have had any effect.⁸

Note that, from the point-of-view of many automobile-oriented residents of Nice, the parallel arterial road (also called the Promenade des Anglais) is much more important than the path for pedestrians and cyclists. Users of the pedestrian path (including me) have often been bothered by the proximity of this busy highway, and there have been numerous proposals to pedestrianize, or at least shrink, it, but tourists don’t get to vote in elections, and most Niçois have been unenthusiastic about eliminating or even downsizing the roadway.⁹ Highly-polluting vehicles (including most trucks) have been banned, and it’s been claimed that the opening of tram line 2 in 2018 and 2019, which runs parallel to the Promenade des Anglais much of the way just a block north, has reduced the amount of traffic on the roadway by 20,000 vehicles a day, but the road is still there. In Nice, as in most of the world’s other cities, it hasn’t been easy to reduce automobile use by even a small amount without eliciting strong protests.

Nice has, interestingly, created a new Promenade on top of the covered-up Paillon River, whose users to a much larger extent than users of the Promenade des Anglais seem to be local residents.¹⁰ The Promenade du Paillon partly consists of land that’s been parkland for decades, but the park has been improved with the kind of fountain that children and adults are invited to play in as well as a very fancy playground. Here are photos.

The Promenade du Paillon as it cuts a green swath through central Nice. Nice’s central city is small but, generally, denser than the central parts of most other French provincial cities. This is a northwestern view from the Colline du Château.

Crowds on the Promenade du Paillon walking by the Mirroir d’eau, an elaborate water fountain that encourages passersby to play in it (although maybe not so much on a cool day in November!).

The Promenade du Paillon is being extended north to a block that once held a bus station and a mid-rise parking facility. There’s a possibility that it could one day be linked to the pedestrian paths that line the uncovered Paillon as it passes through working-class neighborhoods a kilometer or so north, but there are a number of unmovable buildings along the way, among them the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, a convention center, and a newish Novotel.

Nice, like many other French cities, has also done its share of encouraging an increase in the use of “soft” (that is, doux in French) modes of transport by pedestrianizing numerous central-city streets, constructing protected bicycle lanes, and building new tram lines. The fact that the urban area has an unusually dense central city and that its most heavily built-up residential areas consist of narrow corridors of fairly flat land guarantee that there’s a good fit between public transport and land use. Trams, which run often during most of the day, tend to be pretty full, and Nice’s central city is a busy, apparently thriving place.

A tram along Avenue Jean Médecin, a major shopping street in Nice’s CBD. Ordinary motor vehicles are not allowed on this street.

But it’s Nice’s beachfront Promenade des Anglais that remains the city’s most distinctive feature and a major draw for tourists and residents.