Hôtel Byblos

The Byblos was conceived in the sixties as a Mediterranean village in miniature: a cluster of ochre, terracotta and lavender-hued houses stacked around courtyards and a central pool, minutes above the Place des Lices. Its opening party in 1967 drew Brigitte Bardot and half of European café society, and the hotel has run on that founding jolt of glamour ever since, hosting rock royalty and actual royalty across six decades.

Rooms and suites are spread through the village buildings, decorated in a sunny Provençal-meets-bohemian style, some with terraces over the jumbled rooftops towards the citadel. The pool courtyard remains the daytime heart—part social stage, part siesta zone—while the hotel's lanes and gardens give it a playfulness the coast's formal palaces lack.

By night the property becomes legend: Les Caves du Roy, the subterranean nightclub, is among the most famous rooms in the Mediterranean, and the hotel's restaurant terrace runs celebratory dinners through the season. A Sisley spa covers recovery. The Byblos is not about hush; it is about joy, and at that it has few equals.