Location profile: Riviera resort shows off its Cannes-do attitude

Great article from ft.com

Cannes loves putting on a show. The French Riviera resort does exactly that every year, with what has become, since 1946, the world’s most prestigious film festival. So hosting the latest G20 summit is the sort of big international event the city can take in its stride.

Of course some of its 80,000 or so local residents will inevitably complain of the disruption the G20 will provoke, with all its security measures and motorcades of heads of states and their entourages.

After all, this is a time of year when the city, with its promenade (the “Croisette”), its grand hotels and casino, its marina stuffed with fancy yachts, its markets and smart shops, becomes rather pleasantly quiet yet still sunny after the hustle and bustle of the summer season.

But then Cannes is no longer the exclusive winter resort of the old British aristocracy that flocked to the Riviera after Henry Brougham, the lord chancellor of Great Britain, discovered this sleepy Mediterranean fishing village in the 1860s and put it firmly on the high society map.

Later, American literati, including the writer Scott Fitzgerald, made Cannes and its immediate surroundings even more fashionable and famous.

These days, the city relies on its film festival, boat show and other big events and conventions to keep its economy, which relies mainly on tourism, turning all year.

The tourist season has now shifted from winter to summer, but Cannes’ good transport facilities – the busy international airport at Nice is close by and high speed TGV trains serve its station – have made it an attractive convention centre competing with its much bigger neighbour Nice and, a little further down the coast, Monaco.

The seaside city also serves a high-technology cluster in the neighbourhood, even though the Sophia Antipolis technopolis has never really lived up to its early ambitions of becoming a French Silicon Valley.

But Cannes can boast a role in the European space industry with the headquarters of the Franco-Italian Thales Alenia space venture a few miles away at Mandelieu. It is one of Europe’s leading satellite manufacturers.

Cannes’ balmy climate – tender indeed are its nights, as Scott Fitzgerald noted – and privileged position have also made it increasingly popular with French and European retirees, helping to prop up local property prices even during the current economic downturn.

The Carlton hotel is still there, with its twin domes representing the breasts of the belle époque courtesan Caroline “la belle” Otero, and so are the other Croisette grand watering holes – the Martinez, the Majestic and the Grand Hotel, and at the tip of the Cap d’Antibes Eden Roc.

These hotels no doubt will be teeming with heads of state, their mandarins, central bankers, ministers, security guards and journalists during the summit.

It is undoubtedly occasions like this that help maintain the profile of Cannes and the Riviera at large on the international stage. It also seems appropriate that President Nicolas Sarkozy chose Cannes to host the present G20 meeting.

It is bound to provide as much drama and suspense as the Cannes Film Festival itself but without, some may regret, quite the same colourful and frivolous cocktail of glamour, gawpers, baubles, bangles and beads. Yet you never know.