Biot

Biot is a hill village of about 10,000 between Antibes and Cannes, four kilometres back from the sea. It has made things out of earth and fire for two thousand years, and it still does.

Two crafts define it: the great storage jars it produced from Roman times until the nineteenth century, and the bubbled glass it invented in 1956, which is now sold everywhere in Provence.

The glass

Verre bullé — glass with bubbles deliberately trapped inside it — was developed at the Verrerie de Biot in 1956 by Éloi Monod, a ceramics engineer who wanted to do with glass what Biot had always done with clay. The bubbles come from a chemical added to the molten batch; the result is the thick, faintly cloudy tableware in green, amber and blue that you will recognise.

Several workshops are open below the village, and you can watch the blowing. The village also has a small Musée d’Histoire et de Céramique Biotoises on the older trade.

The village

• Place des Arcades — the arcaded square at the top of the village, thirteenth and fourteenth century, with pointed and rounded arches side by side; the best thing in Biot
• Porte des Migraniers and Porte des Tines — the sixteenth-century gates
• Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine — with two fifteenth-century altarpieces attributed to Louis Bréa and Giovanni Canavesio
• The lanes between them, steep, narrow and heavily flowered

The Templars and the Genoese

Biot belonged to the Templars from 1209 and passed to the Knights of Malta. In 1387 it was wiped out — plague and war together — and stood empty for a hundred and eighty years. In 1470 the bishop of Grasse repopulated it with fifty families brought from Oneglia in Liguria, and the Genoese surnames are still on the doorbells.

Musée National Fernand Léger

At the foot of the hill, and worth the trip on its own. Fernand Léger bought a property at Biot in 1955 and died a fortnight later; his widow built the museum on the land and gave it to the state in 1969.

The façade carries a ceramic mosaic 500 m² in area, designed by Léger for a stadium in Hanover and never installed there. Inside are some 450 works — paintings, ceramics, tapestries and stained glass — covering his whole career, and it is the most complete collection of his work anywhere.

Getting to Biot

• By train — Biot station is on the coast at Villeneuve-Loubet, 4 km from the village, on the Nice–Cannes line; a bus runs up.
• By car — 10 minutes from Antibes, 20 from Cannes, 25 from Nice. Park below the village. See parking in France.
• By air — Nice airport is 15 km.

Around Biot

• Marineland — at the foot of the hill, the largest marine park in Europe
• Antibes — 10 minutes, with the Picasso museum in the Château Grimaldi
• Vallauris — 15 minutes, the other ceramics town, where Picasso worked
• Saint-Paul-de-Vence — 20 minutes, with the Fondation Maeght
• Sophia Antipolis — the technology park next door, which is why Biot has 10,000 residents and a village of 1,500

When to go

April to June and September to October. Biot is close enough to the coast to fill with day visitors in the middle of a summer day and to empty again by six; late afternoon on the Place des Arcades is the moment to be there.

See the Côte d’Azur.

Weather in Biot

Updated: 1 September 2026