Free things to do in Nice and the French Riviera

What counts as free here

This page lists dated events with no entry fee: 6 festivals, 2 exhibitions, 2 events, 1 market, 1 show at the time of writing. It is rebuilt every morning from the open data published by the Nice Côte d'Azur metropolitan tourist board, so what you see is what is actually coming up, not a list written once and left to rot. Free means free to get in. A free exhibition may still sit inside a museum with a paying permanent collection, and a free festival may sell food and drink on site.

A note on the language

Event titles and descriptions stay in French, exactly as the organisers publish them. We do not machine-translate them, because a mistranslated venue name or date is worse than no translation at all. Everything Timenjoy writes itself is in English. If a listing matters to you, the venue name and the address are the two things worth copying into a map application.

Free is not the only cheap

Plenty of what makes the Riviera worth the trip costs nothing by definition: the seafront, the old town, the markets, the hill paths above the coast. Those are not events, so they are not on this page. What we can point you to are the places our newsroom has actually been to, where the bill stays small: the coffee shops, the neighbourhood canteens and the ice cream. For everything else that is on, see the full calendar or this weekend.