Cannes wedding

A Cannes wedding runs €120,000 to €1.5 million all-in: €120,000 to €250,000 for 80 guests, €150,000 to €400,000 for 150, and €300,000 upward at 300.

That is the widest spread of any town on this site, and it is not a gradient. Château Saint Georges hires two houses and twenty bedrooms for under €41,000. Château de la Croix des Gardes hires its gardens, for one event over six consecutive days, for more than €900,000. They are twenty minutes apart.

Magic Day weddings in Cannes start from €120,000.

Five, and the first thing to say is that only one of them is in Cannes. The town itself is hotels and a congress centre, so a Cannes wedding is almost always a venue in the hills or along the coast with the guest list sleeping on the Croisette.

A nineteenth-century villa in eleven hectares of park on the hill above the bay, looking down over Cannes and out to the Lérins islands. The gardens take 300 under a structure and the great room 80, and the hire is for six consecutive days and one event.

It is among the most expensive venues on this site, and what it sells is privacy above a town that has very little.

Read the full Château de la Croix des Gardes wedding guide for the six-day hire, the rooms and what a wedding there costs.

A restored medieval castle on the water at Mandelieu, ten minutes west, run as an art foundation rather than a hotel. Its cloistered courtyard of 550 square metres seats 450, which is the largest seated capacity on the French Riviera, and the gardens run down to the sea.

The music rules are unusually precise: 80 decibels for an orchestra outdoors, 90 from speakers, the terrace a lounge after 23h, and the party indoors until three.

Read the full Château de la Napoule wedding guide for the courtyard, the day rates and what a wedding there costs.

An estate above Grasse, forty minutes inland through the perfume country, with two houses and twenty bedrooms that sleep forty and go with every rate. It seats 120.

Its outdoor curfew is 22h, the earliest of any venue we work with on this coast, and the evening continues indoors with the doors shut.

Read the full Château Saint Georges wedding guide for the rate bands, the curfew and what a wedding there costs.

A château at Le Cannet, in the hills immediately behind Cannes, seating 250 with twelve bedrooms. We have not yet written it up from the property’s own paperwork, so the figures here are from third-party listings and we would check them before quoting them to anybody.

A modern event space at Mougins, fifteen minutes inland, whose Salon Riviera seats 250. There is no accommodation on site. As with Garibondy, the numbers come from listings rather than from the property, and hire starts around €14,000.

This is the section that belongs to Cannes and to nowhere else on this coast, and it is the reason the page opens with it rather than with the venues.

Cannes is a congress town. The Palais des Festivals sits in the middle of the Croisette and fills the town four times a year, and two of those four land inside the wedding season.

In 2027 the dates are these. The Film Festival runs 11 to 22 May, twelve days of mid-May for its eightieth edition, and Cannes Lions runs 21 to 25 June.

MIPIM, the property fair, takes 16 to 19 March, and the TFWA exhibition 3 to 7 October. MIPCOM adds most of a week in October once its dates are published.

What that means for a wedding is simple and expensive. In those weeks every hotel room in Cannes is sold months ahead at several times its usual rate, the Croisette is closed to through traffic for parts of it, and transfers that take twenty minutes take an hour. A wedding date chosen without checking the Palais calendar can add more to the hotel bill than the venue costs.

We check the following year’s dates before we discuss a date at all here, and it is the only town on the Riviera where that is the first conversation rather than the fourth.

Four places, running inland from the water.

The hill above the town is Croix des Gardes, in eleven hectares of park with the bay below it. It is the only venue that is genuinely in Cannes and it is priced accordingly.

The coast west is La Napoule, ten minutes along the shore at Mandelieu, where the castle sits on the rocks with its gardens running to the sea. This is the answer for a large guest list and the only one on the Riviera that seats 450.

The hills behind are Le Cannet and Mougins, fifteen minutes up, where Garibondy and Le Park Mougins both take 250. Mougins is a hill village with a serious restaurant tradition, and the drive down to the Croisette is short enough that the hotel block stays in town.

The perfume country is Grasse, forty minutes inland and several degrees cooler, where Château Saint Georges sleeps forty of your guests on the estate. It is the only one of the five that solves the accommodation problem rather than passing it to the Croisette.

Not in practice. Cannes has a mairie on the place Bernard Cornut-Gentille and French law puts the civil ceremony there, but it attaches a residency requirement that rules out most foreign couples.

So the pattern is the national one: the legal marriage happens at home first, and what happens here is a symbolic ceremony at the venue.

One local option is worth knowing about. Saint-Honorat, the smaller of the two Lérins islands, is a working Cistercian monastery twenty minutes by boat from the old port, and it holds religious ceremonies for Catholic couples on its own terms. It is not a venue and it does not take receptions, so a wedding that uses it is a ceremony on an island and a reception back on the mainland, with a boat timetable in the middle of the day.

There is no town-wide hour. The Alpes-Maritimes order names none either, so on this coast the curfew belongs to the property and to its neighbours, and in Cannes the three published answers are unusually far apart.

Château Saint Georges stops outdoor music at 22h and moves inside with the doors and windows shut. That is the earliest we work with on the Riviera and it is the price of an estate in a residential valley above Grasse.

Château de la Napoule runs to 3am indoors. Outdoors it holds an orchestra to 80 decibels and amplified sound to 90, and after 23h the terrace becomes a lounge rather than a dance floor.

Château de la Croix des Gardes publishes no hour and agrees the music with each wedding, which is what eleven hectares of private park buys.

We get whichever applies written into the contract before signature, because a discussion and a clause are different things.

Nice airport is 30 minutes from La Napoule, about 40 from Croix des Gardes and 39 from Grasse. Cannes-Mandelieu, twelve minutes from the hill, takes private aviation.

The train is the thing Cannes has that most of this coast does not. Cannes has its own station on the main line with a direct TGV from Paris, so a European guest list can arrive without flying, and the local trains along the coast reach Antibes in twelve minutes and Nice in half an hour.

In festival weeks none of the above applies, which is the fifth time this page has made the same point and the last.

June and September.

July and August bring the heat and the traffic, and the Riviera’s August is the month when a twenty-minute transfer is unpredictable rather than reliable. May is the obvious answer on weather and is cut in half by the Film Festival. Late June is cut by Cannes Lions.

What is left, and what we book, is the first three weeks of June and the whole of September, with early October a real option because the sea is still warm and the town is quiet until the TFWA exhibition arrives.

This is Cannes’s real advantage and the reason to choose it over a village.

The Croisette holds the Carlton, the Martinez and the Majestic within a few hundred metres of each other, and behind them the town has several hundred more rooms at every price down to modest. No other wedding destination on this coast can put 200 guests in walking distance of one another at four different price points.

It matters because only two of the five venues sleep anyone. Croix des Gardes has seventeen rooms quoted separately from the gardens, and Château Saint Georges twenty. Everywhere else, everybody is in town.

We build the block on the Croisette, run the coaches out and back, and put the couple and the immediate family at the venue where there is one.

Cannes is the easiest large wedding on the Riviera and the hardest date.

Nowhere else on this coast seats 450 at a table, and nowhere else can put the whole guest list in walking distance of one another in the same town. Against that, four weeks a year the town is not for sale, and two of them are weeks couples specifically want. We always start with the Palais calendar and work backwards, which is the opposite order from every other destination.

The second thing is that the venues are not in Cannes and the guests are. Every wedding here is a transfer operation: coaches out to Mandelieu, Mougins or Grasse and back at one in the morning. That is straightforward and it is not free, and it belongs in the first budget rather than the fourth.

The third is the spread between the venues, which is the largest on this site. Croix des Gardes costs roughly seven times Château Saint Georges and they are twenty minutes apart. What the money buys is real, being eleven private hectares above a town that has almost no privacy left, though a couple who wants a garden and a view rather than that specific garden and that specific view has cheaper ways to get one.

Then there is Saint-Honorat, which we raise with Catholic couples early. A ceremony in a monastery on an island, twenty minutes offshore, is the most distinctive thing this stretch of coast offers, and it needs a boat plan, a weather plan and a conversation with the abbey a long way ahead.

Magic Day has been established on the French Riviera since 2015.

Magic Day has worked the Alpes-Maritimes from an office in Nice since 2015, and the company has planned weddings in Europe since 2008. Cannes is half an hour down the coast and we work all of it, from Mandelieu to Grasse, at 80 guests and at 450.

What we do here is the calendar first, then the venue, then the movement of people. The Palais des Festivals decides which Saturdays exist. The venue decides the curfew, and the three on this page are five hours apart. The hotel block decides the transfers, because the guests sleep in the town and the wedding does not happen in it.

Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you which of those dates Cannes will actually sell you.