What are the most worthwhile things to do in Nice on a first visit?

The Chagall museum is the one fixed appointment worth planning around, because its hours are unusual. It splits the day in two: from 1 November to 30 April it opens 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:30 to 17:00, and from 2 May to 31 October it runs 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:30 to 18:00. In March it closes early, at 16:30. Ticket sales stop thirty minutes before closing, and the museum shuts on Tuesdays as well as 1 January, 1 May and 25 December.

What is inside justifies the scheduling. The Biblical Message is a cycle of seventeen canvases that Chagall wanted held together in one building rather than dispersed. Twelve large paintings on Genesis and Exodus fill the first room; a smaller hexagonal room holds five works on the Song of Songs. Standard admission outside temporary exhibitions is €10 full price and €8 reduced, rising to €12 and €10 while an exhibition is running. Groups of ten or more pay €8.50 a head, or €10.50 during exhibitions. Under-18s, teachers and visitors with disabilities enter free, as does everyone on the first Sunday of each month.

The city itself is the second half of the answer. The World Heritage Committee inscribed Nice in 2021 under criterion (ii) — the criterion for an interchange of human values — recognizing it as a winter resort town shaped by generations of foreign visitors who imported their own building tastes. That makes the long seafront promenade, the villa districts and the hotel façades the listed heritage rather than a backdrop to it, and it is why a walk through the 19th-century quarters counts as visiting the World Heritage property.

The old citadel hill rises straight out of the eastern end of the bay, with the port tucked behind it and the old town pressed against its landward side. A major Mediterranean fortification stood on the summit until 1706. From the top the city reads exactly as the inscription describes it — a dense old core on one side, and on the other a long engineered curve of 19th-century frontage facing the water.

Nice's Tuesday problem is real and catches first-time visitors. The Chagall museum closes that day, which means a Tuesday arrival can lose the single most distinctive collection in the city. The French Riviera Pass admits holders free, and so does the first Sunday of the month — but a first Sunday that falls on a Tuesday-adjacent weekend will also be the museum's busiest day of the month. Booking the first slot after the 14:30 reopening is usually the quietest hour of a full day.

• Morning — Start on the citadel hill while the gradient is still in shade, then drop into the old town below it.
• 13:00 to 14:30 — The Chagall museum is shut for this window year-round; it is the right time to be eating rather than queuing.
• Late afternoon — Walk the listed seafront frontage westward with the light behind you, finishing before the museum's 17:00 or 18:00 close if you have saved it for second.

Three dates close the Chagall museum outright — 1 January, 1 May and 25 December — and 1 May in particular catches visitors who assume a spring trip is safe. Ticket desks stop selling thirty minutes before the doors close, so a 17:30 arrival in winter buys nothing. On the city side, the hill between the waterfront and the citadel site is steep and partly stepped, and the old town lanes behind it are narrow and uneven; anyone who needs level ground should plan the promenade and the port rather than the summit. The World Heritage inscription covers a large stretch of urban fabric rather than a gated site, so there is no single entrance, no ticket and no queue — the whole of it is simply open street.

Pair this with the Nice when-to-visit answer for the month-by-month rainfall picture, and with the Nice food answer for what the old town below the citadel actually serves.