Villefranche-sur-Mer: a deep roadstead and a town left unremade
Ninety-five metres of depth a short way off the quay. That depth made the place's history, and still explains its shape.
The roadstead is among the deepest in the Mediterranean. It sheltered war fleets for centuries, which fixed the old town's layout early and spared it the great twentieth-century redevelopments.
The Rue Obscure, a covered thirteenth-century way, still runs some hundred and thirty metres through the old town. It served as a sheltered rampart walk; it is now one of the few surviving covered medieval streets on the coast.
The Chapelle Saint-Pierre, on the harbour, was decorated by Jean Cocteau in 1957. It belongs to the commune and can be visited; it is a useful marker for the boundary between the fishermen's quarter and the dock.
The tiered ochre façades are not decoration: the slope forces narrow, tall buildings, often without a lift, reached by stairs. That is the first thing to check on an old-town property.
