Nice

People lived in the Nice area long before the city: the Terra Amata site has some of the earliest evidence of the use of fire. Greek colonists from Phocaea founded the town around 350 BC and named it Nikaia, after Nike, the goddess of victory, to mark a win over the neighbouring Ligurians. It became a busy trading port, while the Romans built their own town, Cemenelum, on the hill of Cimiez, now a district of the city. Saracens sacked it in the 9th century.

In 1388 the commune placed itself under the protection of the Counts of Savoy, becoming the County of Nice, and Italian replaced Latin as its official language in 1561. French armies took it in 1792, but after 1814 it returned to Piedmont-Sardinia, and only in 1860, under the Treaty of Turin, was it ceded to France, after a plebiscite whose irregularities were evident. About a quarter of the population left for Italy, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice in 1807, strongly opposed the cession.

From the late 18th century English aristocrats wintered here, building the Promenade des Anglais, and Russian nobles and Queen Victoria followed. American paratroopers liberated it on 30 August 1944. After the war tourism and building drove a long boom under the mayors Jean and Jacques Médecin. The Treaty of Nice was signed here in 2001. On 14 July 2016 a truck was driven into the Bastille Day crowd on the promenade, killing 86 people, and in 2020 three people were killed in an attack at the Notre-Dame de Nice basilica. In 2021 UNESCO listed the city as a World Heritage Site, "Nice, Winter Resort Town of the Riviera".

Nice's light has drawn painters for well over a century. Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall both have museums here, and Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Arman and Sacha Sosno worked here too; the MAMAC gives much space to the School of Nice. Composers and writers came too: Friedrich Nietzsche spent six winters in Nice and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra here, and Anton Chekhov finished Three Sisters in the city.

The local identity is distinct. Niçard, or Nissart, is an Occitan dialect with strong Italian influences, still spoken by a minority and seen on bilingual street signs, and the city's unofficial anthem is Nissa la Bella. Folk music and the farandole, an open-chain community dance, survive at local festivals. Since 1860 a cannon on Castle Hill has been fired at noon, a tradition going back to Sir Thomas Coventry, who wanted to remind residents to have lunch on time. In recent decades immigrants have come from North and West Africa and South-East Asia.

The Nice Carnival in February is one of the city's great occasions, with its parade on Place Masséna, and the jazz festival fills summer evenings. OGC Nice play in Ligue 1 at the Allianz Riviera, the Paris–Nice cycle race ends in or above the city each March, and the city also has a top-flight ice hockey club.

About 358,000 people lived in the city at the 2023 census, making it the fifth-largest commune in France, and nearly one million live in the wider urban area. It is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes and the largest French city that is not a regional capital. The population has changed little since the 1970s, as people moving in are balanced by natural decline.

Tourism is the leading industry: the city has the second largest hotel capacity in France and receives about four million visitors a year, and the airport is the country's third busiest. Business parks, the Acropolis convention centre, Côte d'Azur University and the Sophia Antipolis technology park near Antibes provide much of the rest of the work. Since 2026 the mayor has been Éric Ciotti.

Most people live in flats, in the dense streets of the centre and the port, or in the hill neighbourhoods and valleys that spread inland. Days follow a Mediterranean rhythm, with early markets, long lunches and evenings outdoors, and the seafront fills with runners, cyclists and walkers year round. Housing costs, summer crowds and traffic on the coastal roads are constant local concerns.

Niçois cooking is close to that of Provence but also to Liguria and Piedmont across the border, built on olive oil, anchovies, fruit and vegetables; the city has around 200 recipes of its own. Socca is a thin pancake made from chickpea flour. Pissaladière is an onion tart with anchovies or anchovy paste, descended from a Ligurian kind of pizza. Farcis niçois are vegetables stuffed with breadcrumbs, meat — generally sausage and minced beef — and herbs.

Salade niçoise, in its traditional form, is a tomato salad with eggs, tuna or anchovies, olives and often lettuce; traditionalists leave out cooked vegetables such as potatoes and green beans. Pan bagnat is a sandwich of pain de campagne filled with a salade niçoise. Ratatouille, daube, barbajuan, tapenade and fougasse complete the list of local specialities. Local fish — mullet, bream, sea urchins, anchovies and poutine, the tiny young fish of the coast — is used so much that a proverb says fish are born in the sea and die in oil.

The Cours Saleya market is the place to see the produce, and the old town's lanes and the streets round the port hold the traditional restaurants. Wine is made in the city itself, at wineries such as Château de Bellet, and Provence's rosé is on most lists.