Discover why A-listers have always fallen in love with the Cote d'Azur

For more than a century, the Cote d’Azur has been an Anglo-American enclave of the most gilded kind. Staying in small hotels then building villas, the literati and glitterati sets created concentric circles of wealth and glamour, sandwiched between the hills of Provence and the Mediterranean.

Queen Victoria wintered here, while her son Edward VII nipped over to play the casino tables. Above all, they dedicated themselves to sheer, unsullied enjoyment of life, nature and delicious food.

The epicentre of this heritage is the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on Cap d’Antibes. It’s one of those rare hotels that really does live up to both its history and hype – almost exactly 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald used it as inspiration for the fictional Hotel d’Etrangers in his novel Tender Is The Night, catching a mix of the hedonism and nihilism of the Belle Epoque 1920s when du Cap’s real-life guests included Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter.