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The Côte d'Azur has inspired the likes of Anton Chekov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Chagall, Picasso and Renoir, all of whom spent many productive years working in the region.
Tourism has long been the mainstay of the economy here and today it accounts for 55% of the region's revenue. The sub-tropical Mediterranean climate, (320 days of sunshine a year) cool mountain air, and 40 kilometers of beaches, assure the Côte d'Azur a top-ranking position as a holiday destination. Last year, nine million tourists came to the region, half from outside France. This gave the Côte d'Azur a 1% market share of all international tourism. The region has a hotel capacity of 153,000 beds in 876 hotels, of which over 30% are in the four-star category. BUSINESS TOURISM Along with leisure tourism, business tourism is booming on the Côte d'Azur. The region has 20 modern convention centers with a total of 1,000 conference rooms. Of the one million foreign visitors who come to the region every year for various business events, about 400,000 come for conventions and seminars. Cannes, best known for the world-famous film festival, also hosts the concurrent international film market; two television programming markets a year and the MIDEM music market. Monaco is home to the Monte Carlo television festival and market, while Marseilles recently built a state-of-the-art audiovisual conference center in its historic Napoleonic fortress to accommodate its Sunny Side international documentary market and festival. These events have helped reinforce the region's particularly strong trade relation-ship with the United States, where the film and television industries account for the second largest source of export revenue. All the major producers, broadcasters and distributors of film, television and multi-media, from Time Warner to Microsoft, come to the region several times a year for these key events. This has had the knock-on effect of attracting a number of other conventions to the region and the Côte d'Azur is now the number one venue for scientific and business conferences in Europe. In 1999, the Côte d'Azur hosted 170 seminars and congresses, including the GSM World Congress, the Software Publishing Association Convention, the Sapphire Pan-European Conference in Nice, The International Publishing and New Media Market (MILIA) in Cannes, the International Venture Capital Summit at Sofia Antipolis and a year-long series of conferences on high bandwidth networking. With its Acropolis Conference Center, Nice is, unsurprisingly, the second largest conference center in France, after Paris. Built in 1984, it consists of two buildings. The first, Acropolis Congress, is a leading venue for scientific conventions and seminars. The second, Acropolis Exhibitions, hosts more than 15 international industrial shows a year, as well as concerts and sports and media events. José Carreras, the world-famous opera tenor, performed here recently to widespread acclaim. Acropolis won the Best Overseas Conference Center award three years in a row (1991-1993) and in 1999 won the Beyond Borders Global Achievement prize awarded by Adams Business Journal. BACK>> |
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St. Paul de Vence
