There is a staircase in Cannes that the whole world knows, even if most people have only ever seen it on a screen. Twenty-four steps of grey granite rise from the boulevard de la Croisette toward the entrance of the Palais des festivals et des congrès — and every May, those steps become the most photographed stretch of pavement in Europe. For the other eleven months of the year, the building belongs to the city, to the delegates of a hundred trade fairs, and, on select afternoons, to visitors curious enough to see what lies behind the façade.
On Monday, 20 July 2026 at 15:30, the Palais opens its doors for a guided tour conducted entirely in English. The visit lasts approximately ninety minutes and is capped at 25 participants, which keeps the group intimate enough for conversation. Admission is 6 € for adults; children under twelve enter free; holders of a carte mobilité inclusion pay 3 €. Advance booking is obligatory — the Palais does not leave this to chance.
The Building Behind the Myth
The current Palais — locals call it, with mild affection, 'le bunker' — opened in 1982, replacing a Belle Époque casino that had hosted the earliest editions of the Festival de Cannes. The architecture is unapologetically functionalist: a low, horizontal mass of concrete and glass anchored at the western end of the Croisette, facing the sea. Seen from the right angle at dusk, with the Lérins Islands faint on the horizon, it carries a certain monumental calm. Seen from the wrong angle, mid-morning, it simply looks large. What the building lacks in ornament it compensates for in scale and in the sheer density of history accumulated inside it since the festival moved here.
The Festival de Cannes itself dates to 1946, conceived as a counter-programme to the Venice Film Festival, which had become politically compromised under fascist influence. Cannes offered something different: a Mediterranean setting, a democratic jury system, and, eventually, a global platform that could make or break a director's career with a single Palme d'Or. By the time the new Palais was built, the festival had already produced its defining images — Monica Vitti on the steps, Marlon Brando declining his Oscar, the New Wave directors arguing in the lobby. The building inherited all of that weight.
'The Palais is the second-largest congress centre in France and an economic engine for the entire region' — a fact the tour makes legible through the sheer variety of spaces it contains.
What the Tour Reveals
The guided visit is designed to move through the building's multiple identities. Participants walk the same routes taken by festival guests — past the grand auditorium, through corridors lined with the handprints pressed into cement by arriving stars, and into spaces that shift function across the calendar: one week a film premiere, the next a pharmaceutical congress or a luxury trade show. The Palais hosts events year-round, and the tour makes that versatility visible rather than treating the building as a film-world reliquary.
The guide will draw on the more unusual chapters of festival history — the incidents, the controversies, the moments that did not make the official photographs. This is where a 90-minute English-language tour earns its time. Context transforms architecture. A corridor is just a corridor until you know what was decided in it.
Cannes in late July is warm and unhurried in a way it never quite manages during the festival fortnight. The Croisette's famous palms cast long shadows by mid-afternoon; the terrace cafés are full but not frantic. An hour and a half inside the Palais, followed by an aperitif on the waterfront as the light shifts over the bay — that is a reasonable way to spend a Monday in the South of France.
For anyone with a serious interest in cinema, European cultural history, or simply the mechanics of how a mid-sized coastal city became one of the world's most recognisable names, this tour offers something that a walk along the Croisette alone cannot: the inside view, in the most literal sense.