La Croix des Gardes

Highlights: Villa Éléonore-Louise · Château Saint-Georges · Château Vallombrosa · Villa Rothschild · Parc forestier de la Croix des Gardes

West of Cannes, a hill covered with umbrella pines and mimosas overlooks the bay and the Estérel. Long before the Croisette became fashionable, it was here, on these silent slopes, that Lord Brougham had the town's first winter villa built — giving rise to what Cannes was to become.

Origins: a hill, a legend, a name

The name of La Croix des Gardes dates back, according to local tradition, to 1525: King François Ier is said to have posted a garrison at the top of the hill, charged with watching the sea and keeping a lookout for incursions by the Barbary pirates who then haunted the Provençal coast. Two of these lookouts are said to have been murdered, and a cross erected in their memory is said to have given the hill its name.

Long covered with pines and wild woodland, this height overlooking Cannes and gazing towards the Estérel remained, until the nineteenth century, a natural expanse set apart from the modest fishing village established below, around the Suquet.

The arrival of Lord Brougham and the birth of an English quarter

Everything changed in 1834. Lord Henry Brougham, former Chancellor of England, was refused entry to Nice, then stricken by a cholera epidemic. He stopped at Cannes, a mere fishing town, and fell under the charm of the site. He acquired a plot of land on the first foothills of the Croix des Gardes and had built there, from 1835, the villa Éléonore-Louise, the work of the architect Louis Larras — the very first holiday residence built in Cannes.

Brougham's gesture set an example. As early as 1837, the British general John Taylor in turn raised the château Saint-Georges. Other villas followed: Vallombrosa, Rothschild, Romée, so many residences that made up, over the course of the century, what was then nicknamed the "quartier anglais". La Croix des Gardes thus became, even before the Croisette, the true cradle of winter Cannes.

Landmark episodes of an aristocratic hill

Lord Brougham lived in his villa until his death, which came on 7 May 1868, at the age of ninety. His residence, enlarged in 1844 under the direction of the architect Jacques Guichard, was later broken up and divided into apartments — a fate common to many of the great villas of the neighbourhood at the turn of the twentieth century.

Over the decades, the ornamental gardens of these properties welcomed species from all over the world, laying the foundations of a remarkable botanical heritage of which the forest park still preserves witnesses today. In 1990, a monumental cross of polished steel, the work of the sculptor Jean-Yves Lechevallier, was installed at the top of the hill, perpetuating the memory of the founding legend of the place.

The transformation of an estate into a residential neighbourhood

The twentieth century saw the hill gradually covered with residential properties, without ever forsaking its wooded character. Aware of the value of this setting, the local authorities had a large part of the hill classified as a protected natural area, thus preserving the parc forestier de la Croix des Gardes, its pines, its mimosas and its walking trails, at the very heart of a largely urbanised city.

This choice of preservation has shaped the enduring identity of the neighbourhood: a rare balance between exceptional built heritage and protected nature, just a few minutes from the centre of Cannes and its lively shores.

Living at La Croix des Gardes today

Today, La Croix des Gardes remains one of the most sought-after neighbourhoods of Cannes: its discreet villas, its wooded properties and its panoramas over the bay, the îles de Lérins and the Estérel massif make it a privileged place of residence, far from the bustle of the seafront yet very close to its liveliness.

To live at La Croix des Gardes is to carry on the intuition Lord Brougham had nearly two centuries ago: that of a place where the silence of the pines, the mildness of the climate and the view over the Mediterranean compose a rare art of living — inherited from history, offered today to those who know how to recognise it.