Mimosas and violets are already blooming across the south of France, making late winter the perfect moment for a pre-spring road trip – from the coast to the perfume capital of the world
The road south from Bormes-les-Mimosas does not announce itself. It begins quietly, winding out of a medieval village that has hung gardens from its stone walls since the 12th century, and then, within a few hundred metres, the landscape changes entirely. The hills open up. The scrubland turns gold. And the scent — that particular sharp-sweet warmth that sits somewhere between honey and hawthorn — begins to come through the car window whether you open it or not. You have found the Route du Mimosa, and it will not let you go.
Every January and February, as most of Europe turns its collar up against grey skies and bare-branched misery, the coastline between Toulon and Cannes performs a quiet miracle. The mimosa trees come into flower. Not decorously, not sparingly — but in eruptions of gold so intense they seem to vibrate against the blue backdrop of the Mediterranean winter sky. Locals call the mimosa their soleil d’hiver, their winter sun. Driving through the Massif du Tanneron — home to the largest wild mimosa forest in Europe — in late January or February, it is easy to understand why. The forest does not merely flower; it ignites.
The Route du Mimosa, the 130-kilometre road that threads through this spectacle from Bormes-les-Mimosas in the south to the hilltop city of Grasse in the north, is one of the great unsung road trips of Europe. It passes through eight towns, each of which stages its own celebration of the bloom. It winds along the Corniche d’Or, a stretch of coastline so dramatic that the Estérel massif drops in red volcanic cliffs straight into a turquoise sea. And it ends, as perhaps all roads in this part of France should, in a city that has spent four centuries turning flowers into something close to immortality.
Where the Journey Begins: Bormes-les-Mimosas
Bormes-les-Mimosas earns its hyphenated suffix every winter with unambiguous conviction. The village clings to a hillside above the Corniche des Maures in a cascade of bougainvillea, lavender, and — right now — mimosa, its narrow lanes threaded between medieval stone houses like a botanical garden that has quietly absorbed an entire town. To walk Bormes in February is to experience the peculiar joy of a place that has decided to be beautiful on principle and maintains that commitment even in the coldest months.
Every year, Bormes organises Mimosalia — more than just a celebration, a genuine festival devoted to this southern flower, bringing together experienced nurserymen, amateur arboriculturists, and nature lovers. Conferences, craft markets, plant sales, and guided walks fill the hillside weekend. But the real reason to come to Bormes in January and February is simpler: to stand at the top of its ruined castle and watch the hillsides below turn gold, acre by acre, as if the sun itself had decided to set on the wrong side of the sky.
The mimosa has flourished so well in this region of France that it has become a cultivated crop, producing an impressive 18 million stems per year, particularly in the Var department. That industrial scale, however, is nowhere visible in Bormes. Here it feels entirely wild — a botanical takeover, voluntary and magnificent.
The Forest Road: Tanneron and Mandelieu-la-Napoule
From Bormes, the route moves east along the coast before turning inland toward the Massif du Tanneron — and it is here, on the winding roads above Mandelieu-la-Napoule, that the mimosa achieves something close to overwhelming. The massif’s forests contain some 200 varieties of the plant, and in peak season the canopy above the walking trails is so densely yellow that you seem to move through a permanent golden light. The sight of golden canopies against the backdrop of azure skies is a visual feast that leaves an indelible mark.
The Fête du Mimosa in Mandelieu-la-Napoule — held in mid-February — features a vibrant flower parade, a magical nighttime procession, and a firework display. The town, situated just west of Cannes on the Côte d’Azur, bills itself as the capitale du mimosa, and on festival weekend the claim feels entirely legitimate. Floats travel through the streets stacked with thousands of freshly cut stems. A Mimosa Queen is elected. Guided two-hour walks thread through the Tanneron forest, revealing the scale of what the hillsides conceal. The walks are commentated in French, which only adds to the atmosphere.
The festival has been a cherished tradition since 1931, making it one of the region’s most enduring winter celebrations and a significant contributor to local tourism, drawing thousands of visitors.
There is a subtler pleasure, too, in stopping along the road itself — at a roadside stall where a farmer is selling bunches of cut mimosa for a few euros, or at a viewpoint where the Estérel drops away below you in red rock and the sea runs flat and blue to the horizon. The mimosa, viewed from here, is not decorative. It is fundamental — a structural element of the landscape, as essential to the February Côte d’Azur as lavender is to the Luberon in July.
A Botanical Parenthesis: The Violet Village
Before the road reaches Grasse, it passes within easy distance of one of the most improbable places in Provence — a medieval village that has devoted itself, for nearly a century and a half, to a single purple flower.
Tourrettes-sur-Loup sits on a rocky spur fourteen kilometres from the Mediterranean, between Vence and Grasse, its stone houses arranged in a half-moon circuit that has served as the village’s effective outer wall since the Middle Ages. The village has been devoted to the cultivation of violets since 1880, with the flowers growing in natural rocky terraces in the olive gardens and in modern greenhouses on vertical pillars and hanging baskets.
Today, the only place that the Victoria variety is cultivated is in Tourrettes-sur-Loup — a simple-petalled flower with a strong fragrance, standing on a long peduncle of around 25 centimetres. The scent, in the narrow lanes of the village in late February, is extraordinary — not the synthetic violet of perfume counters but something rawer and more insistent, a sweetness that seems to come from the stone itself.
The Fête des Violettes, held every first weekend of March, was created in 1952 by Victor Linton, a Scottish-born artist who had settled in Tourrettes, with the intention of honouring the village’s flower growers and their expertise. Over the decades the festival has grown into a civic institution: the floats that once used bicycles and improvised carts are now elaborate constructions entirely covered in flowers, assembled by local associations over weeks of preparation. The main event is the corso fleuri — the floral procession — followed by the bataille de fleurs, a joyful street battle in which visitors and locals pelt each other with violet petals.
The village market on festival weekend runs all day: violet soap, violet syrup, violet liqueur, violet-flavoured chocolate and macarons, crystallised violets in small glass jars. In one of the stone-arched shops along the Grand’Rue, a woman explains how to add a few drops of violet concentrate to a glass of white wine, or champagne, or even a fruit salad — a drop or two only, she emphasises, warming to her theme with the seriousness of an alchemist. In the small permanent museum, the Bastide aux Violettes, the history of the village’s floral industry is traced from its origins in the perfume trade through to the present day.
The Violet Festival will be held again from 28 February to 1 March 2026, making this the perfect year to include Tourrettes on any mimosa route itinerary. It is, in the most precise possible sense, directly on the road to Grasse.
The End of the Road: Grasse, and the Alchemy of Scent
Every road in this part of Provence leads, eventually, to Grasse. The city announces itself from below — perched on a limestone escarpment above the coastal plain, its old town a tightly packed mass of ochre and pale stone against the hillside — and the scent announces it from further away still. The town and its surroundings enjoy a warm, maritime climate perfect for growing lavender, jasmine, and the centifolia rose, and Grasse’s flower farmers and experts in extraction techniques have made the region the centre of the perfume industry since the late 1700s.
The claim to be the perfume capital of the world is not marketing hyperbole. It is a statement of documented fact, recognised formally by UNESCO in 2018 when it inscribed the perfumery of Grasse on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The town is home to six of the ten largest fragrance companies, drawn by its unique ecosystem that integrates raw material production, biotechnology, and research and development.
The story of how a tanning town became the nose of the world is one of the most extraordinary industrial pivots in European history. In the 16th century, Grasse was primarily known for leather: its tanneries were among the finest in France, supplying gloves to aristocrats across the continent. When the fashion for gants parfumés — perfumed gloves — swept the courts of Europe, the tanners of Grasse found themselves at the intersection of two trades and had the good sense to pursue both simultaneously. By the 18th century the leather had been largely abandoned, and the flowers had won.
What made Grasse uniquely suited to this vocation was not merely commercial ingenuity but geography. Grasse is located far enough inland that it is sheltered from the sea air, and it has fertile soil and a sunny and temperate microclimate, which makes it ideal for flower farming. The result is a terroir — a concept usually reserved for wine — that gives Grasse flowers a chemical profile found nowhere else on earth. The jasmine grown here, for instance, has a lower proportion of indolic compounds than jasmine from other regions, giving it a quality that is subtler and more complex — less overtly sweet, more nuanced. It is a difference that Chanel’s master perfumers have spent over a century insisting upon, and that they continue to guard with something approaching religious conviction.
The Fields of Chanel: A Story Woven in Jasmine
The most celebrated expression of Grasse’s floral heritage is, of course, a small bottle with interlocking Cs on the cap. The oils of jasmine and tuberose from the valley of Siagne above Grasse have been at the heart of Chanel No. 5 since Ernest Beaux created the fragrance in 1921, and during the Second World War, extraordinary efforts were made to ensure that the supply of these key components remained uninterrupted.
Today, those supply lines run through a single family farm. The Mul family estate in Pégomas, a village just south of Grasse, has been growing centifolia rose, geranium, iris, tuberose, and jasmine for five generations. Joseph Mul partnered with Chanel in 1987 to cultivate flowers exclusively for Chanel fragrances. The arrangement saved both the farm and the fragrance: by the 1980s, the agricultural fields around Grasse were being sold off to developers as the region’s tourist economy expanded, and the supply of genuine Grasse jasmine — essential to No. 5’s formulation — was at serious risk. Chanel’s intervention preserved the farm; the farm preserved the scent.
The jasmine plants of Grasse have a lower proportion of indoles, giving them a distinct note — more subtle, less syrupy than jasmine grown elsewhere, with a green tea quality that is the signature of the region.
Each bottle of Chanel No. 5 requires 1,000 jasmine flowers, all of them hand-picked at dawn on the Mul family estate. Between 7,000 and 10,000 jasmine flowers are required to produce just one kilogram of blossoms, and it takes roughly one tonne of flowers to create one kilogram of jasmine absolute. The numbers are almost too large to comprehend. They explain why jasmine absolute from the Grasse region commands a price of over €59,000 per kilogram — a sum that makes even the most extravagantly priced bottle of the finished perfume seem modest by comparison.
The centifolia rose — the Rose de Mai — presents similar scales of labour and scale. The Rose Centifolia blooms only in May, and the harvest is a meticulous process: the rose requires well-drained soil and abundant sunlight, is pruned in January, and is harvested at dawn when the petals are laden with essential oils and the fragrance is at its peak. Twelve tons of centifolia rose petals are needed to obtain one kilogram of absolute.
The Mul farm is not open to the general public except during the harvest season, but Grasse itself has made its perfumery craft accessible in ways that few other towns in France have managed. Three major historic perfume houses — Fragonard, Molinard, and Galimard — offer tours of their workshops, allowing visitors to trace the journey from petal to flacon in real time. The most memorable experience, however, is simply to walk the old town in February, when the ExpoRose preparations are still months away but the surrounding hills already carry the ghost of what is coming: the jasmine not yet in flower, the rose not yet in bud, but the city already vibrating with the accumulated memory of centuries of bloom.
The Festivals of Spring: A Calendar for the Road
For anyone planning this journey, the timing matters. The Route du Mimosa is officially active from January through March, but the peak of the bloom — and the peak of the festivals — falls in February and early March. Eight towns participate in the official festivities, with parades, art exhibits, guided visits and more.
Bormes-les-Mimosas runs its Mimosalia festival in late January, the Tanneron festival falls on the last Sunday of January, Mandelieu-la-Napoule’s grand Fête du Mimosa occupies a long weekend in mid-February, and Tourrettes-sur-Loup rounds the season off with its Fête des Violettes on the first weekend of March. By that point, the almond trees across the Côte d’Azur are also coming into blossom — small white flowers easily mistaken for cherry blossom, which appear along the roadsides from February onward and add another layer to what is, in aggregate, one of the most spectacular botanical spectacles in Europe.
The calendar continues into spring and summer, for those who want to extend the itinerary: Grasse honours its rose growers during ExpoRose in early May, when over 25,000 roses adorn the town, and the Fête du Jasmin fills the first weekend of August with fireworks, traditional dances, and the sprinkling of jasmine water through the streets. But the winter and early spring window — January to March — has an intimacy that the summer festivals cannot quite replicate. The tourist trade has not yet arrived in earnest. The villages are navigable on foot without crowds. The mimosa is at its most operatic. And the light — the famous Mediterranean winter light, clear and almost horizontal, that painters and perfumers have been trying to capture for centuries — falls on everything with extraordinary generosity.
Practical Notes for the Road
The route can be driven comfortably in two or three days at a leisurely pace, though a week allows time to stop properly in each village and take the forest walks that are among the experience’s real rewards. The most scenic approach is to begin at Bormes-les-Mimosas, head east along the coast via Sainte-Maxime and Saint-Raphaël, then turn inland through the Estérel before climbing to Mandelieu, Tanneron, Pégomas, and finally Grasse. The Corniche d’Or section between Saint-Raphaël and Mandelieu is one of the most beautiful coastal roads in France — red volcanic rock dropping into sea of an almost Caribbean blue — and should not be hurried.
Nice is the most convenient gateway, with direct flights from London in around two hours. From Nice airport it is a thirty-minute drive west to Cannes, from which all points on the route are within easy reach. Grasse sits twenty minutes north of Cannes by road — far enough inland to feel like a different world, close enough to the coast that you can smell both jasmine and sea on the same afternoon if the wind is coming from the right direction.
That combination — of the ancient and the fragrant, the coastal and the high, the theatrical winter festival and the quiet contemplative walk through a forest that smells of honey — is what distinguishes this route from more celebrated French itineraries. The lavender fields of the Luberon, spectacular as they are, draw millions in July. The mimosa road, in February, remains something closer to a secret: a golden drive through the tail end of winter, with spring already visible in the hills, and the whole ancient perfumed machinery of Provence just beginning, very quietly, to wake up.
The Route du Mimosa runs 130km from Bormes-les-Mimosas to Grasse, via Sainte-Maxime, Saint-Raphaël, Mandelieu-la-Napoule, Tanneron, and Pégomas. The mimosa bloom peaks between late January and mid-February. The Fête des Violettes in Tourrettes-sur-Loup takes place on the first weekend of March (28 February–1 March 2026). ExpoRose in Grasse runs 8–11 May 2026. Nice Côte d’Azur airport is the recommended gateway.
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