How to Get to Nice: Nice Côte d'Azur Airport, Gare de Nice-Ville & Lignes d'Azur Trams

Serving as the primary transport hub for the entire French Riviera and neighbouring Monaco, Nice combines France's busiest airport outside Paris with a direct underground airport-to-harbour tramway and a coastal railway corridor linking Cannes, Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Menton, and Ventimiglia in Italy.

Arriving by Air: Nice Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)

Nice Côte d'Azur Airport (IATA: NCE, ICAO: LFMN) lies 5.9 kilometres (3.7 miles) southwest of central Nice at the western end of the Promenade des Anglais, beside the mouth of the Var river. Tracing its origins to an aviation meeting on the fields of La Californie in 1910 and opened to commercial passenger traffic in 1946, the airport handled 15.23 million passengers in 2025, ranking third in France behind Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. It comprises two commercial passenger terminals (Terminal 1 and Terminal 2) alongside a 1,500-square-metre Business Aviation Terminal opened in 2010, and also functions as the gateway airport for Monaco, 20 kilometres to the northeast.

• Tram Line 2 to the City Centre and Port: Opened in stages from 30 June 2018 and completed to the harbour in December 2018, Lignes d'Azur Tram Line 2 departs directly from Terminal 2 and Terminal 1 via the Grand Arénas interchange. Running every 8 minutes during the day, the line enters a city-centre tunnel beneath Rue de France and Boulevard Victor-Hugo (stopping at Jean-Médecin and Garibaldi / Le Château) before terminating at Port Lympia.
• Rail Connection at Nice-Saint-Augustin: Located 400 metres from the airport at the Grand Arénas multimodal hub, Nice-Saint-Augustin station provides direct TER regional rail connections west toward Antibes and Cannes and east through Gare de Nice-Ville toward Monaco and Ventimiglia.

Arriving by Train: Gare de Nice-Ville

Situated at an altitude of 16 metres in the Thiers quarter at the northern end of Avenue Jean-Médecin (kilometre point 224.114 of the Marseille to Ventimiglia line), Gare de Nice-Ville (locally called Gare Thiers) is the city's principal railway station. Placed in service on 18 October 1864 by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM) railway company, its passenger building was inaugurated in 1867 to a Louis XIII design by architect Louis-Jules Bouchot, featuring red brick, Arles stone sculptures, an oak-panelled vestibule, and a wrought-iron glass train shed spanning the tracks.

The station receives SNCF TGV high-speed trains from Paris and Lyon (which travel on high-speed lines up to 320 km/h as far as Marseille Saint-Charles before continuing along the scenic coastal track), overnight Intercités trains from Paris, the scenic mountain branch to Breil-sur-Roya and Tende (opened in October 1928), and frequent TER Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur trains serving Villefranche-sur-Mer, Beaulieu-sur-Mer (for Cap-Ferrat), Èze-sur-Mer, and Monaco. Two secondary SNCF stations within the city, Nice-Saint-Augustin in the west and Nice-Riquier near the port, offer convenient stops for coastal commuters.

Getting Around Nice: The Lignes d'Azur Network

After Nice's original electric tramway (1900 to 10 January 1953) was dismantled in favour of motor traffic, the city inaugurated its modern Lignes d'Azur Alstom Citadis tramway on 24 November 2007. Today the 27.5-kilometre network operates across four lines: the U-shaped Line 1 links Henri Sappia in the north through Gare Thiers, Avenue Jean-Médecin, Place Masséna, Opéra / Vieille Ville, and Place Garibaldi to Hôpital Pasteur; Line 2 runs east to west between the airport and Port Lympia; Line 3 (opened on 13 November 2019) serves Saint-Isidore and the Var valley; and Line B serves the CADAM administrative centre.