Day 480 (Sunday)

Huw woke up super early and took this amazing photo of the sunrise

It was 35 degrees in the sun at 9am – loving it. After a brunch or real British sausages (yum yum) we decided to go to the fort in Antibes on Kisbee. It took just under an hour and we found a free car park just for the fort. We had to walk along part of the beach of Antibes

  

and these two women made us laugh – why would you sit with your back to the sea and look at a wall?

This is what Wikipedia has to say about it (all the photos are mine)

Fort Carré d'Antibes, is a 16th-century star-shaped fort of four arrowhead shaped bastions that stands on the outskirts of Antibes, France. Henri de Mandon built the fort and then during the 17th century, the Marquis de Vauban redeveloped it.

History

The Romans probably built the first fortifications at Antibes. In 1553, a tower called la tour Saint-Florent was built around a preexisting chapel. Henry II had four bastions added in 1565, whereupon it became Fort Carré (the squared fort).

In the 1680s, Vauban strengthened Fort Carré, adding traverses to protect against ricochet fire and exchanging the stone parapets, which were liable to scatter deadly splinters when hit by shot, for brick ones. Vauban also enlarged the embrasures and added outer walls to the fortification.

Later, the fort's design was modified to take eighteen cannon. The entrance to the fort is through a triangular work that protrudes from the walls, and which is loopholed and pierced by a heavy wooden door.

From here, there is a narrow bridge that leads into the fort itself via the flank of one of the arrow-headed bastions. Inside, there are barrack buildings for officers and men as well as the ancient chapel, which has been preserved through the successive stages of military development of the site. In addition to improving the defences of Fort Carré, Vauban fortified Antibes itself, adding a land front of four arrow-headed bastions around the town, as well as seaward fortifications, including a bastion on the breakwater closing the harbour.

During the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte was briefly imprisoned here. In July 1794, after the violent overthrow of Robespierre, General Bonaparte was detained as a Jacobin sympathizer and held in Fort Carré for ten days. His friend and political ally, Antoine Christophe Saliceti, secured his release.

Then in 1860, the fort played an important role when France annexed Nice.

When we got to the entrance we were quite surprised when we were told that we couldn’t go in for 25 minutes when the next guided tour was due to start. We decided to just walk around in because we didn’t really want to do a guided tour. When we did some research when we got home we regretted this decision as the tour sounds really interesting – so that is something we will do in the near future. There were some lovely views from up there…

This is the old town of Antibes

and this is the royal quay of Port Vauban

I’m not sure who this statue is of but it looks World War One

 

Last summer we were on a bus going up to Saint Paul de Vence when we saw a square of the old town of Cagnes sur Mer and it looked really pretty so we jumped back on to Kisbee (I’m getting much faster getting on and off and there’s even an element of elegance going on now) and headed towards it. En route I spotted this tree – isn’t it wonderful?

I hate to admit it but we didn’t find the old town but we did find the enormous shopping mall Riviera Polygone and it was bloody awful!

I need new jeans and a pair of leggings for the winter and there is a Primark in this mall.

Huw needed some new shorts so when we got to Primark we split up to make the nightmare shopping experience a bit quicker. There was a massive pile of leggings but they were mostly navy blue and I wanted black. I then tried to find a pair of jeans; I just wanted a pair of plain faded blue jeans. After looking for what seemed for hours I finally found a pair with only minimum rips. All the rest were either high-waisted skinny jeans or they all had ripped knees. I know I’m not young but surely you should be given the option of buying a pair of jeans with no rips in them? The ones I did get are not perfect but I bought them so that I could get out of there. The queue to pay for them was enormous but they did have a lot of staff working the tills.

This rather interesting statue was at the entrance to the mall

There was a lot of traffic coming home and we both had sore bums by the time we got home. As we were approaching Villefranche we saw that Christina O was heading back to the bay.