Èze wedding

An Èze wedding runs €100,000 to €1.2 million all-in: €100,000 to €250,000 for 40 guests, €150,000 to €700,000 for 80, and €650,000 upward at 130.

The spread is not the usual one. Most places on this coast have a range of venues at a range of prices, and the figure moves with what you choose. Èze has two small hotels charging in the low hundreds of thousands and one private peninsula charging in the high, with nothing in between them.

So the band a couple lands in is decided almost entirely by the guest list rather than by taste. Magic Day weddings in Èze start from €100,000.

Three, and they divide by address before they divide by anything else.

A group of houses built into the village wall at 430 metres, once belonging to a Swedish prince, with a Michelin-starred restaurant and a terrace that hangs straight over the water. It seats 38 and that is a firm number, or 26 on one long table outdoors.

The dinner privatisation is a flat fee and the buyout of all fourteen rooms is what buys the later hours.

Read the full Château Eza wedding guide for the privatisation, the buyout and what a wedding there costs.

A hotel threaded through the old houses of the same village, with gardens, terraces and a pool hung off the cliff, and two Michelin stars in the kitchen. Eighty guests is the stated wedding maximum and the terraces are rated at 84 standing.

One condition governs everything here: a DJ or a band is permitted only in Les Remparts, and only when the fourteen rooms around it are booked for two nights.

Read the full La Chèvre d’Or wedding guide for the ceremony terraces, the fourteen rooms and what a wedding there costs.

A private peninsula at Èze-Bord-de-Mer, five acres with a single gate, sitting in the water rather than above it. It seats 130 in the Loggia Sud or on the Grand Salon terrace and takes 240 standing on the Grande Terrasse, and the hotel is taken whole above 70 guests or for any dance party.

Read the full Cap Estel wedding guide for hire by season, the minimum spend and how the three nights are built.

Èze is two addresses that share a name, and couples routinely arrive thinking it is one.

Èze-Village is the one on the postcards: a medieval village on a cone of rock at 430 metres, on the Moyenne Corniche between Nice and Monaco, with the Jardin Exotique and the castle ruins at the top. No road runs through it. There is a single lane, it is steep, it is cobbled, and it is walked. Château Eza and La Chèvre d’Or are both here, a couple of hundred metres apart.

Èze-Bord-de-Mer, also called Èze-sur-Mer, is at sea level on the Basse Corniche directly below, with a pebble beach and its own railway station on the Nice to Ventimiglia line. Cap Estel is here, on a peninsula of its own.

Between the two runs the Chemin de Nietzsche, a footpath up the cliff named for the philosopher who climbed it and worked out part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra doing so. It takes about an hour going up and it is not a wedding-shoe proposition, which matters more than it sounds: guests who assume the two Èzes are walkable have not seen the gradient.

The practical version. The village if the wedding is small and the photographs are the point. The sea if the guest list is large, the budget is large, or anybody is going to struggle with a hill.

This is the thing to settle before anything else, because in Èze it settles everything else.

Thirty-eight at Château Eza. Eighty at La Chèvre d’Or. A hundred and thirty at Cap Estel, which costs several times either of them. Those are the only three numbers in the commune, and the first two are the smallest wedding capacities on the French Riviera.

A guest list of fifty has two venues and a real choice. A guest list of ninety has one, and it is the expensive one. We find that couples who fall for the village and then grow the list past eighty end up somewhere else entirely, so the number is worth being honest about early rather than late.

Not in practice. Èze has a mairie 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 one used across France: the legal marriage happens at home first, and what happens in Èze is a symbolic ceremony, which all three venues arrange and which carries no paperwork of its own.

What the village adds is a constraint the paperwork does not. Neither Château Eza nor La Chèvre d’Or has any covered alternative for a ceremony, and the Chèvre d’Or’s brochure says so in plain language on its second page. On a terrace cut into a cliff there is nowhere to put a marquee either. A wet ceremony in Èze-Village is a decision tree agreed months in advance, not a tent.

The Alpes-Maritimes prefectural order names no hour, which on this coast leaves each property to set its own against its neighbours. In Èze the neighbours are very close, because the village is a single block of stone houses, and the three curfews reflect that exactly.

Château Eza stops outdoor music at 22h30 and clears the terrace at 23h. A buyout of all fourteen rooms moves that to 1am, which is what the buyout is really for.

La Chèvre d’Or ends at midnight, with one extra hour to 1am for €1,000, and only if the fourteen rooms around Les Remparts are taken for two nights. Acoustic music, a jazz trio or a strolling band needs no room block and still stops at midnight.

Cap Estel stops outdoors at 23h and has no indoor curfew at all, because a private peninsula with one gate has nobody to disturb. Its rule runs the other way: the dance floor is indoors at any guest count, whatever the hour.

We get every one of these written into the contract, because a hotel’s custom and a hotel’s contract are different documents.

Nice airport is 29 minutes from the village and about 30 from Cap Estel. Monaco is 13 minutes, Nice itself 18, Antibes 44 and Cannes 47, so the eastern half of the Riviera is inside half an hour and the western half is a journey.

Èze-sur-Mer has a railway station on the Nice to Ventimiglia line, which puts Nice at about fifteen minutes and Monaco at under ten by train. For a wedding at Cap Estel that is a genuine option for guests staying along the coast.

For the village it is not. The station is at sea level, 430 metres below, and the connection up is a bus or a taxi.

Èze-Village has no car park for its hotels and no vehicle access to their doors. Every guest is set down at the top of the village, at a drop-off that takes one car at a time, and walks the last stretch along a medieval lane.

For eighty people this is a production in itself. We schedule it in waves with a holding point below and a coordinator at each end, and for any guest with mobility difficulties it is planned individually rather than absorbed into the crowd. It is the single thing couples underestimate about the village, and it is the reason a Cap Estel wedding feels easier at every guest count.

Drones are forbidden across the commune of Èze and inside the hotel properties, which the Chèvre d’Or states in its own conditions.

That rules out the aerial footage most Riviera films open with. What it leaves is the view itself, which from either village hotel runs down the cliff to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat lying in the water, and which is the reason anybody chooses Èze in the first place. Photographers who know the village shoot sunset from the terraces and the lanes at first light, and they do not miss the drone.

May, June or September.

La Chèvre d’Or’s gastronomic restaurant runs from April to late October and Cap Estel is closed through the winter, so the season is decided by the venues before the weather comes into it. July and August bring the heat, the cruise passengers through the village and the traffic on the corniche, which at the wrong hour on a Friday can double the run from the airport.

One date to check before anything else: the Monaco Grand Prix, in late May. The Chèvre d’Or excludes that weekend from its published room rates and every hotel between Nice and Menton is full and expensive. Thirteen minutes from Monaco is a selling point for fifty-one weekends of the year.

Between them the three venues sleep 28 at Château Eza, about 30 in the Chèvre d’Or’s fourteen rooms and 56 at Cap Estel. At any real guest count most people are sleeping elsewhere.

Beaulieu-sur-Mer is the usual answer: ten minutes from the village, on the water, with a proper spread of hotels and a station of its own. Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Villefranche-sur-Mer are the same distance and prettier, with fewer rooms and higher rates. Nice at 18 minutes has a city’s worth of everything, and Monaco at 13 has the opposite of value.

We build the block in Beaulieu and keep the village rooms for the two families and the wedding party, because the people staying in Èze-Village are the people who benefit from waking up there.

Èze rewards a small wedding more than anywhere else we work. Thirty-eight people on the terrace at Château Eza, or fifty at the Chèvre d’Or with a jazz trio and a two-star dinner, is a better evening than the same money buys on almost any other part of this coast, because the setting is doing all the work and there is nothing to compete with it. We always put the small version in front of couples first here.

The second thing is that the village and the sea are not variants of the same wedding. Cap Estel is a resort on flat ground with its own beach, its own gate, no curfew indoors and room for 130. The village hotels are cliff terraces with no parking, no cover, a hard capacity and an 11pm problem. The photographs look similar and the weekends do not resemble each other at all.

The third is the fourteen-room rule at the Chèvre d’Or, which is the largest single number in this commune that nobody sees coming. If you want a DJ in the village, the block is just over €64,000 for two nights before anyone has eaten, and it is not negotiable. Couples who meet it early choose the hotel on purpose. Couples who meet it late feel ambushed.

Then there is the rain, which we treat as a real planning item here rather than a footnote. Neither village hotel has a covered ceremony space and neither has anywhere to put a marquee, so the answer is a sequence agreed in advance with the hotel and the photographer, and the honest acknowledgement that a wet May Saturday in Èze-Village is a different day.

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

Magic Day plans weddings in Èze from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the choice between the village and the sea, the capacity question settled before anyone falls in love with a terrace, the fourteen rooms and whether they are worth it, the curfew written into the contract, the symbolic ceremony and the mairie paperwork behind it, the block in Beaulieu, and eighty people moved up a village lane in sequence.

We have worked the Alpes-Maritimes for years, with an office in Nice, and Èze is fifteen minutes from it. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you which of the three venues the guest list has already chosen for you.