A Guide to Cannes Part 3: Life's a Beach - Cannes Private Beaches

Well they say life's a beach... so go to a beach club! The French Riviera is a hubbub of beach clubs, most notably Pampelonne Plage in St Tropez, think Club 55 and Nikki Beach St Tropez, and the long line of private beaches running along La Croisette, Cannes.
It's Saturday, the sun is shining, it's the weekend and where better to be than the beach?

Parasols come in handy when you can't handle the heat!

I can't say I have sampled them all - very few to be exact. Guys don't want to pay money to go to the beach! So the only one that I have spent the whole day at is Plage C Beach. Despite the fact that Baoli Beach looks amazing and I really want to go, we didn't plan ahead and there were no sun loungers left by the time it came to making a reservation!

The pros of going to a private beach?

Celebrating the pros of the private beach!

• You get a sun lounger = comfortable
• You don't necessarily need to bring your own towel. Convenient - no soggy towel to carry home
• You have more space! No people in your personal space on the beach, and you don't have lots of annoying children splashing you in the sea. There are far fewer people in the water than over at the public beaches.
• Sand! You don't have to lie directly in the sand, so only your feet get sandy as you walk back and forth from sea to sun lounger. Plus as you're raised up when sunbathing, nobody kicks sand all over your face, and you don't have loads of people walking past you in the first place to do the kicking sand in your face.
• They bring you wine. It comes in a bucket full of ice - nicely chilled.
• They bring you food. Yum yum. Fresh fish, Mediterranean cuisine, all that jazz!

The cons? ... It costs. The public beach is public... you pay €0!

So, Katie and I spent the day at CBeach. I have been there before a couple of times for lunch, and it hasn't disappointed. They do a really good pineapple mojito and mi-cuit de thon.

When we went for lunch in May it wasn't quite warm enough to go in the sea

We paid €28 for our sunbeds, towels not included. We decided to take our own instead - we had them with us so why not use them? It was just fun sitting in the sun, not getting so sticky, sandy and salty like you do on the public beach. Unfortunately I wasn't so snap-happy so don't have loads of photos to show.

We got a bottle of rosé

Katie had salmon with pain suédois (bread that looks like it has been pin-pricked) for lunch, and I had tartare de thon - raw tuna with some lettuce and pretty purple edible flowers sprinkled on top. I only needed the starter sized dish, from experience I know that you can only manage so much tuna tartare so wouldn't need the mains sized plate!

Plenty of pink on my part!

On the beach they only provide you with the beach snack menu, but if you ask they will bring you the full drinks list and restaurant menu anyway, and serve it to you at the sun loungers, so don't worry if you don't love everything on the small menu. I think we each paid about €65 for the day, and it was well worth it for the amount of time we spent in the sun, definitely longer than I normally spend on the public beach. Fresh drinks, food, showers, toilets, less sand... So worth it!

Enjoying the view out to sea. I spy with my little eye... a yacht!