Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

Cap Ferrat is a peninsula shaped like a Y between Villefranche and Beaulieu, reached from Pont Saint-Jean on the Basse Corniche. One branch is almost the whole cape, with its lighthouse at the southern tip; the other, narrower, runs east to the Pointe Saint-Hospice. Its name is usually traced to the Latin ferus, wild – the cape was scrub until its residents planted it, and it is now an arboretum of species brought from all over the world.

In the sixth century the hermit Hospice lived in a tower on the eastern point; Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy fortified it, and Louis XIV's armies destroyed the fort in 1706. Saint-Jean was a hamlet of Villefranche, a few fishermen's houses round the church and the port, until it became a commune in its own right in 1904.