Côte d’Azur

Category: Harbor

The French Riviera (French: Côte d’Azur) is one of the most famous resort areas in the world, as much as its Italian counterpart. It extends along the Mediterranean Sea from Menton near the Italian border, including the cities and towns of Monaco, Nice, Antibes, and Cannes.
The Côte d’Azur has been inhabited since prehistoric times. A paleolithic site of a nomad people dating to 950,000 B.C. was discovered in the cave of Vallonet, near Roquebrune-Cap Martin, with stones and bones of animals, including bovines, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus. Other sites were found at the cave of L’Escale, near Saint-Estève Janson (600,000 B.C.), and at Terra Amata (400,000 BC), where a fireplace was discovered, one of the oldest in Europe.

The Cosquer Cave, an undersea cave between Cassis and Marseille discovered in 1991, has the oldest man-made art in the region: drawings of bisons, seals, horses and penguins, and outlines of human hands, dating to between 27,000 and 19,000 B.C.