Apartment 47m2 – Villefranche-sur-Mer

The apartment is currently being renovated and will be fitted with a new kitchen and bathroom as part of this price. The apartment can also be sold in its current state – please refer to our photos for the condition – with a price adjustment, the buyer can finish the kitchen and bathroom themselves. The windows have double glazing.

A garage in the building can be bought separately for €30,000. In the nearby area there is also available public parking (free of charge in the winter, payable during the summer months), and the bus stop connecting you to both Nice and Monaco is right at your doorstep.

The location of the property on the Basse Corniche is excellent – the beach is within a few steps walking distance – one of the most beautiful sandy beaches on the Cote d’Azur, sheltered beneath the cliff and with the most stunning views out to sea, and the walk to the old town of Villefranche, with its idylic cobbled waterfront, takes less than 20 minutes along the beach. Here, you will find restaurants and cafes with one of the Riviera’s most stunning views – across the water to the green slopes of Cap Ferrat, and the beach below the cliffs. The Old Town is without doubt one of the most beautiful places on this coast, vibrant without being noisy, still inhabited by many locals and boasting a wealth of little shops and boutiques, cafes and restaurants, many of which are open year-round.

Villefranche Mairie, or town hall, is situated in an impressive Napoleonic fortress, which stands guard over the two main port areas of Villefranche – La Darse, with its old school ship repairers and pleasure craft (and who’s vaulted stone ateliers appeared in James Bond’s Never Say Never Again) and Port de la Sante, where you can hire boats, moored up next to the local fishermen’s traditional ‘pointu’ painted wooden boats. The clear azur waters of the bay, the relaxed beauty of the old town – some of the houses still bear the dates (c.1640) carved over the doorways – the elegant curve of the bay (recently proposed as a UNESCO world heritage site) and the near perfect beaches with their small cafes and great summer atmosphere, make Villefranche-sur-mer one of the most lovely places on earth.

Villefranche has a mainline railway station, fifteen minutes’ walk from the apartment, which is only a few stops one direction from Monaco and Italy, and in the other, two stops from Nice Centre, where a tram can take you direct to the airport. There are excellent local buses, running throughout the day along the coast from Monaco to Antibes. For those who like to exercise on foot, there are many local walking paths around the cliffs or down at the water’s edge, and access to the famous St Jean Cap Ferrat coastal path begins at the end of the beach, next to the famous villa once owned by Hollywood Great, Errol Flynn, again part of the view from the terraces of the villa.

Facing the Old Town, just a few steps from this apartment, is the legendary Villa Nellcote, a stunning mansion right on the water’s edge that was home for a short while in the early 70s to Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones, where the band wrote one of the decade’s seminal albums ‘Exile on Main Street’. For generations, the world’s well healed have been coming to Villefranche, to enjoy the discreet beauty and peace of this wonderful village – once you’ve discovered Villefranche, you’ll never want to be anywhere else!