Less than a square mile of rock, harbour and garden — and a good deal more texture than its reputation suggests.
Monaco is among the smallest states in the world, a sliver of less than a square mile pressed between the Maritime Alps and the sea. It is known for a handful of images — a harbour crowded with white hulls, a motor race through its streets, the belle époque facades of Monte-Carlo — and those images, repeated until they are worn smooth, can make it seem a place without depth.
The visitor who stays a few days finds otherwise. Beneath the postcard lies a city of steep stairways, planted terraces, old lanes and vertiginous views, compressed into so little ground that almost everything can be reached on foot, provided one does not mind climbing.
The Rock
Begin early, on the Rock — the promontory where the old town sits high above the water. Its narrow streets of ochre and faded pink houses are quiet before the day’s visitors arrive; shutters are still closed, a café’s chairs still stacked, and from the ramparts the coast unrolls in both directions, headland after headland dissolving into haze.
At the seaward edge of the cliff stands the Oceanographic Museum, opened in the early twentieth century and built directly above the sea on foundations that drop sheer to the water. It is as much monument as museum — an extraordinary piece of architecture raised to the study of the ocean, with an aquarium below and a terrace above that commands one of the finest panoramas on the Riviera.
“Monaco is a vertical city. The best of it is found by climbing.”
Gardens on the cliff
For a place so densely built, Monaco is surprisingly green. High on the cliffs above the city, succulents and cacti have long been planted among the rocks — a celebrated collection, with the sea a long way below, whose opening to visitors is worth checking before the climb. Closer to the harbour, smaller gardens and terraces offer shade and quiet within a few minutes of the busiest streets: a bench under a pine, the smell of warm resin, a fountain nobody seems to have noticed.
Moving between them teaches the city’s peculiar geography. Public lifts and stairways connect levels that would otherwise demand a long detour, and some of the pleasantest discoveries lie at the top of a flight of steps one took only out of curiosity.
Monte-Carlo
Across the harbour, Monte-Carlo was developed in the second half of the nineteenth century as a resort, and much of its architecture belongs to that confident period. Its opera house, designed by the architect of the Paris Opéra, is a small jewel of gilt, painted ceilings and red velvet, and attending a performance there is one of the more memorable ways to spend an evening on the coast.
The formal gardens that descend towards the sea, with their fountains and clipped palms, are at their best in the early evening, when the heat has eased and the light turns the facades the colour of apricots.
The harbour, in the morning
Monaco’s relationship with the sea is constant. The harbour is a place of work as well as display, and a walk along the quays at eight in the morning — crews hosing down decks, ropes being coiled, a tender puttering out to a mooring, the water throwing moving light onto white hulls — is one of the simplest pleasures the place offers. Beyond it the coast runs on towards France and Italy, and a short journey by train or boat opens the wider Riviera.
What stays with most visitors is the scale. Everything is close; nothing sprawls. In a single day one can walk from a medieval lane to a nineteenth-century opera house to cliffs planted with desert succulents, and be back at the harbour for dinner. Monaco is small, dense and deliberately composed — and, for anyone willing to look past its reputation and up its stairways, considerably more interesting than it first appears.
