Carved into the rocks, La Corniche d'Or links Saint-Raphaël to Cannes and was opened in 1903 by the Touring Club de France. It overhangs a sea of extraordinary clarity.

History : It was in 1903 that the costal link was completed between the Var and the Alpes-Maritimes, a real Riviera postcard famous throughout the world. Two centuries after the Via Aurelia : In many places, this road, which had become little more than a bad path, hardly used apart from a few customs officers watching the shore, follows the same route the Via Aurelia took, a Roman road built two centuries before, then abandoned following barbaric invasions leaving the coast practically deserted for fifteen centuries. The new road was built because of several favourable factors coming together at the same time: tourists, looking for new places to explore and visit at a time when the birth of the automobile offered them new perspectives, found a powerful ear with the Touring Club de France, who launched the venture. Locals joined in with enthusiasm.

Success was immediate: in fact the road made a return journey possible between the two big coastal towns in a single day, past magnificent countryside bringing together the picturesque views on the spot and the grandeur of the panorama.

In spite of the scares caused by the peaks, the bends, the winding, narrow road hardly three metres wide it was on foot, on horseback, on cycles and in cars that the road was carved out, namely by the ancestors of the present sovereigns of Denmark and Holland.

Hardly changed by the First World War, it was between the wars, again thanks to the Touring Club, that it was widened. The aim: certainly, to respond to the growing needs of the tourist traffic, but also, in a less obvious but just as powerful a way, to bow to the demands of urban development which was in its infancy along these shores. Right across the commune of Thoule, this meant in particular the extraordinary work of stone cutters working their way into the red porphyries at the rate of three stones per day and per worker. Under the leadership of the Highways Department, an immigrant labour force from Italy showed proof of great know-how, building retaining walls, parapets, pavement kerbs in particular, with such skill and dexterity as is rarely found today, taking our breath away in admiration if only we could take the trouble to look at them properly.

During the thirties, this policy of big public works had the effect of lessening the devastating effects of the economic crisis that was raging, by enabling the heads of families from across the Alps to feed their families, a vital need in the absence of any social security.

The Second World War was to see the Corniche dOr used first of all by the retreating French army, fleeing from Menton before the Italian invasion in June 1940, then serving as a border under the Occupation between military no-go areas, before the general evacuation preceding the 1944 landings.