Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc

No hotel embodies the French Riviera like the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Since 1870 the white Napoleon III mansion has crowned the pine forests of Cap d'Antibes, its gravel allée running arrow-straight through nine hectares of gardens to the Eden-Roc pavilion on the rocks, where a seawater pool blasted into the cliff hovers above the Mediterranean. Fitzgerald fictionalised it, Hollywood colonised it, and the mythology has compounded ever since.

Rooms in the main house preserve high-ceilinged Riviera classicism in whites and corals; those in the pavilion put the sea directly below the balconies. Service carries the house's particular polish—formal, French, and famously capable of managing the world's most photographed guests without ever seeming impressed.

Days follow the water: cabanas along the rocks, ladders straight into the blue, tennis under the pines and long lunches on the pergola terrace. The restaurant delivers refined Mediterranean cooking to a dress code, and the bar's sunset ritual is a Riviera institution. Open roughly April to October, it remains the standard by which Mediterranean glamour is measured.