Last Saturday, I decided to head to Saint Paul de Vence with my roommate and two other friends. I’ve been looking for day trips from Nice and Saint Paul de Vence is not only accessible by bus, but it also looks absolutely beautiful!

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We left at a reasonable time of 9:45 from Parc Phoenix, and even though it wasn’t super early, there weren’t many people so we got a seat on the bus! I had to stand all the way to Eze so being able to get a seat feels like an achievement. By the way, lots of places will state this but the bus to Saint Paul de Vence has a bit of a quirk – you can use your Lignes d’Azur annual card or ten trip ticket there, but you can’t use that on the way back! Apparently, it’s in a different bus network and for more details, you can check out the Best of Nice’s blogpost.

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Saint Paul de Vence is, like Eze, a village full of artists and art shops. There are also quite a few museums, but I’ll have to admit that all we wanted to do was to walk around the village because it was so beautiful!

There is a tourist office at the entrance to the village and I would highly recommend picking up a map when you arrive. There are maps in English and the staff there are helpful – we managed to find the bus stop for the bus back thanks to them. Plus, we didn’t know about the walk outside the city until they told us about it.

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If you walk up the street next to the tourist office instead of turning left, you’ll find a street full of galleries. We wandered in and out of a few and I thought the pieces were really cool!

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The only place that we paid money to go in was Folon’s Chapel, also known as The White Penitents’ Chapel. This was Jean-Michel Folon’s last work before his passing in 2005. Although the place is small, it only costs 3 euros to get in and the mosaic is worth seeing up close. The chapel is small and peaceful and it’s a lovely place to spend some time in.

Like I mentioned just now, you can walk around the city as well! The walls of Saint Paul de Vence are pretty high, so if you want a view of the valley, you must walk around the city.

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According to the lady at the tourist office, the route is only 1km, so it’s pretty short. I think we got lost halfway (somehow!) because we ended up in a parking lot, but there’s a really great view soon after starting the walk so it was still worth it!

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Before we left the place, we had lunch at Le Tilleul for the simple, shallow reason that it looked nice and it had the Michelin 2019 sticker (according to the Saint Paul de Vence website, it was recommended in the Guide Michelin). There’s a 3-course set meal for 29 euros with an entre (melons and ham – delicious separate but I’m not convinced that they pair well together), a main (chicken with figs, but honestly the fig sauce tasted a bit like barbecue sauce), and a dessert of your choice. We had no reservations but because we ate around 12:30, we were able to get a table immediately – the restaurant filled up pretty quickly after that, so I would suggest going early!

Honestly, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of Saint Paul de Vence; we went for a casual day of exploration, but looking at the official website, there are tours and a lot more museums that we missed! There’s even a farmer’s market on Wednesdays and Fridays! But we had a great day out, even though all we did was walk around.