Alpes-Maritimes department (06)
Alpes-Maritimes department (06): Nice, Cannes, Grasse
Alpes-Maritimes (06) is the department where the Mediterranean runs straight into the Alps: 1.13 million people on 4,299 km², and only two arrondissements — Nice and Grasse. Outside Paris, no part of France carries a deeper imprint of Russian history — and nowhere in the South has pricier rent. Below: the administrative map, the cities, and where to find your people here.
Alpes-Maritimes is the most compact and most densely built-up department in the South of France: 4,299 km², much of it mountainous, and 1.13 million people pressed into a narrow coastal strip. It is also the place with the longest history of Russian settlement in France outside Paris. If you are moving to Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Grasse or Menton, this is the department you land in administratively.
Alpes-Maritimes in numbers
- Region: Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA).
- Préfecture: Nice.
- Population: 1,128,418 (INSEE, 2023).
- Area: 4,299 km², 163 communes.
- Arrondissements: just two — Nice and Grasse.
Two arrondissements for more than a million residents is unusual for France, and it has a direct effect on daily life: the administrative load is concentrated in two places, and the queues there are what you would expect.
Préfecture and sous-préfecture: where to go for paperwork
Préfecture des Alpes-Maritimes, Nice. Centre administratif, 147 boulevard du Mercantour, 06286 Nice Cedex 3; the foreigners’ service also operates from 15 bis rue Delille, 06000 Nice. Website: alpes-maritimes.gouv.fr. One detail worth knowing: the foreigners’ service admits only people with a confirmed appointment or a convocation to collect a permit — turning up ‘just to ask’ will not work. Most procedures now run through the ANEF portal.
Sous-préfecture of Grasse. 3 avenue du Général-de-Gaulle, 06130 Grasse, tel. 04 92 42 32 00. It serves the Grasse arrondissement — that is, residents of Cannes, Antibes and Grasse itself. By appointment only.
Menton residents travel to Nice: Menton sits in the Nice arrondissement, and foreigners’ files are handled by the préfecture. The TER train to Nice takes about 35 minutes.
OFII — territorial directorate of Nice. 147 boulevard du Mercantour, 06200 Nice, tel. 04 89 15 81 70, nice@ofii.fr. Long-stay visa validation, the medical exam and the CIR integration contract. The office has already changed address once — check it on ofii.fr before your visit.
The procedures themselves are broken down in the Moving to the South of France section. Addresses for CPAM, CAF and France Travail differ from city to city and are listed in each city guide.
Cities in the department we have guides for
- Nice — around 350,000 residents, France’s fifth-largest city, the department’s préfecture, a university, and the country’s second-busiest airport by passenger numbers.
- Antibes — ≈77,000 residents, the department’s second city; next door is the Sophia Antipolis technology park, France’s largest science and technology cluster.
- Cannes — 74,350 residents, the international film festival, a yacht harbour and a well-established Russian-speaking diaspora.
- Grasse — around 51,000 residents, the ‘perfume capital of the world’, set on a hill 333 m above sea level, and the centre of its own arrondissement.
- Cagnes-sur-Mer — 53,354 residents (INSEE, 2023), the department’s fourth-largest commune: 13 minutes by train to Nice, France’s second-most important racecourse, and the house where Renoir spent his last 11 years.
- Le Cannet — 41,938 residents (INSEE, 2023), the hills immediately above Cannes: cheaper than its neighbour, a separate commune since 1774, and the Bonnard museum.
- Menton — ≈30,600 residents, right on the Italian border; roughly 300 sunny days a year.
There is a separate thematic overview of the coast — Russian speakers on the Côte d’Azur; the full city list is in the Cities of the South of France section.
How transport works
By air. Nice Côte d’Azur (NCE) is France’s second airport after the Paris ones, about 7 km from the centre of Nice; tram T2 takes you from the terminals into town in roughly 25 minutes. That is precisely why flying out of Alpes-Maritimes beats the train: Paris is about an hour and a half by plane, but from 5 hours 40 minutes by rail.
By train along the coast. The Marseille–Ventimiglia TER line runs the full length of the shore and effectively works as a commuter service: Menton–Nice ≈35 minutes, Menton–Monaco ≈10 minutes, 2–4 trains an hour. Antibes has direct TGV INOUI services to Paris (≈5 h 20 min); from Grasse the train reaches Cannes in about 30 minutes and Nice in about an hour, changing at Cannes (Grasse is a branch terminus — there is no direct service to Nice).
Around town. Nice runs the Lignes d’Azur network: three tram lines plus buses, single ticket €1.70 with a card. Cannes has Palm Bus (€1.80), Antibes has Envibus (€1.50, with transfers within the hour), Grasse has Sillages, and Menton has Zest buses plus a free electric shuttle in the centre.
What sets Alpes-Maritimes apart from the other southern departments
From the sea to Alpine valleys in an hour. The department covers only 4,299 km², yet the change in altitude across it is enormous: from the Nice seafront to the mountain valleys of the Mercantour is under two hours by car. In winter this is the one place in France where you can genuinely ski in the morning and sit on a terrace by the sea in the afternoon.
The most expensive rents in the South. The coast is touristy and prestigious at once, and that keeps prices consistently high. On a tighter budget, and for the same climate, it is worth looking at Hérault or the inland towns — the difference is tangible.
A genuinely international environment. Nice and Cannes are full of English speakers, Italians and Scandinavians; getting through your first months without fluent French is easier here than in rural France. Monaco is close by, and the Italian border is a 10-minute drive from Menton.
A technology cluster. Sophia Antipolis, next to Antibes, is France’s largest technology park, and it is arguably the main local source of skilled jobs that have nothing to do with tourism.
Microclimate. The Alps shelter the coast from northern winds: winter in Menton holds at +10…14 °C, and the town is reckoned to be the sunniest in France.
Where Russian-speaking life happens in Alpes-Maritimes
This is the only department in the South where Russian-speaking infrastructure grew up historically rather than appearing in the past few years.
Orthodox churches. In Nice, Saint Nicholas Cathedral (2 av. Nicolas II / bd Tzaréwitch, 06000 Nice; Sunday liturgy at 10:00, hours at 9:40, Korsun Diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate). It was consecrated in 1912 with the financial involvement of Nicholas II and is the largest Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe. Nice also has the parish of Saints Nicholas and Alexandra (6 rue Longchamp, Romanian Patriarchate). In Cannes there is the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel (40 bd Alexandre III, services 10:00–12:00, Archdiocese of the Western European parishes of the Russian tradition). The full list is in our Orthodox churches directory.
Groceries. Nice alone has five Russian and Eastern European shops: Kazatchok (105 rue de Roquebillière), Avrora (29 rue Arson), Matriochka (10 bd Tzarewitch), Kalinka (12 rue d’Angleterre) and Gastronomie Russe (6 bd Gambetta, near the cathedral). Nowhere else in the South comes close to that concentration — details in the shops directory.
History. The street names around the cathedral — Boulevard du Tsarévitch, avenue Nicolas II — are not tourist branding but a trace of the fact that the Russian aristocracy wintered here from the mid-19th century. The longer story is on the Russian speakers on the Côte d’Azur page.
Our people in department 06
In all honesty, our base is Montpellier, and the big gatherings usually happen there. But the ‘Vibe South of France’ chat has members in Nice, Cannes, Antibes and Menton, and smaller groups meet up along the coast regularly. The point is that there is one chat for the whole South: instead of a dozen dead city groups of 20 people each, there is a single community of around 400 people, where someone has always just been through exactly your procedure at the Nice préfecture or gone flat-hunting in Antibes a month ago.
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