Col de Vence & Gourdon — Classic Loop from Cagnes

You start at sea level in Cagnes-sur-Mer, between Nice and Antibes. The first stretch is a warm-up: a gentle, steady drag away from the coast, out through the suburbs and into quieter country behind the Riviera. The traffic thins as you gain height, and you climb almost without noticing it — until you roll into Vence at around 300 m. Fill your bottles and take a last coffee here. The work starts now.

Out of Vence the road finds its rhythm immediately: 9.6 km at a steady 6.7%. The gradient never lets up enough to recover, but never quite forces you off the pace either. You climb through olive terraces and low pine, then the trees thin and the surface opens onto bare limestone for the final ramps — steep and shadeless to the 963 m col. On a warm day this is where the Vence side earns its Paris-Nice pedigree: no shade, and nowhere to bail once you've started. There's no slack section to sit up and roll, so hold something back from the bottom.

Over the top the effort changes character. You stay high across open country, and then Gourdon arrives the way clifftop villages do — suddenly, and higher than everything around it. Get off the bike here. Gourdon is one of the officially listed Plus Beaux Villages de France, a knot of stone houses on the edge of a drop. Take the terrace at the Auberge de Gourdon with a coffee and a croissant — from here the whole Riviera opens beneath you, the coast running from Antibes out to the open Mediterranean. It's the view you came for.

From Gourdon it's essentially downhill to the sea: roughly 28 km of near-continuous descent, steepest in the few kilometres down to Châteauneuf-Grasse where the road drops at around 6%. It's fast and sweeping rather than technical — hands off the brakes, let the corners come. The gradient eases toward Villeneuve-Loubet, and the last kilometres into Cagnes-sur-Mer are flat run-in, legs empty, the sea back on your right.

What the numbers don't tell you: 1,476 m over 82 km reads as moderate, but it's nearly all stacked into one climb. Hold something back on the lower slopes of Col de Vence and save it for the top — that's where the day is won or lost. Carry enough water out of Vence; there's nothing on the col.