Palais des Festivals et des Congrès
The red carpet on the Montée des Marches stays out all year — not just in May — which means on a quiet Tuesday in October you can stand at the foot of those steps, look up at the grey concrete bulk that locals call 'le bunker', and take the whole thing in without a publicist in sight.
The Palais des Festivals et des Congrès dominates the western end of the waterfront: six stories of modernist concrete designed by Sir Hubert Bennett and François Druet, inaugurated in December 1982 after costing 550 million francs to build. Inside, 18 auditoriums and 35,000 square metres of exhibition space make it one of Europe's busiest convention venues, though for most visitors it remains inseparable from the one fortnight in May that turned Cannes into a proper noun.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to book guided tours in English — offered year-round outside festival season — to get inside the Grand Auditorium Louis Lumière and stand in those 2,300 seats. The Walk of Fame in the forecourt rewards a slow look; the hand and footprints in cement are more intimate than you expect.
Deals in Palais des Festivals et des Congrès
Book directly at the provider
How Palais des Festivals et des Congrès came to be
Cannes hosted its first film festival in 1946, but the city didn't get a purpose-built venue until 1949, when a Palais rose on the Croisette — on what is now the site of the JW Marriott. That original building was eclectic enough to host the 4th and 6th Eurovision Song Contests in 1959 and 1961, alongside cinema.
By the late 1970s, the festival had outgrown it. The arrival of MIPTV, the television market, in 1965 had signalled that Cannes was becoming a year-round convention city, not just an annual cinema party. Construction of the current Palais began in 1979 on the site of the old municipal casino; it opened in December 1982. Expansions followed — the Espace Riviera in 1999, the panoramic Rotonde Lérins in 2006 — along with a decade-long modernisation programme from 2009.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.