Plage du Larvotto
The historic public beach of the Principality — built in the 1960s, renovated in 2021, and whose 2003 dykes give way to three islets of rock.
Larvotto beach is the historic public beach of the Principality, on Avenue Princesse Grace. Several hundred meters long, it concentrates most of Monegasque swimming and a front of shops by the sea, in a district born on a peninsula reclaimed from the sea in the 1960s.
Three lives, one shore
The beach tells of three ages. That of the original development, when Monaco created the Larvotto peninsula and its seaside front: in 1968, the ceramist Roger Capron decorated the facades located under the promenade with twenty-nine marine panels.
That of the major renovation, presented to the press in 2019 and entrusted to the architect Renzo Piano as an aesthetic extension of the extension at sea. It will be completed at the beginning of 2022, after reopening to the public on July 3, 2021: larger beach, restructured promenade, wheelchair access, anti-jellyfish nets, and the return of “historic” shops and beachgoers.
That of today, that of the fight against erosion. The geotubes submerged in 2003 to retain the sand lasted twenty years. They give way to three islands of riprap, the installation of which will be completed in spring 2026 - a protection also designed to encourage colonization by marine species.
Continuous maintenance
Contrary to what the image of an unchanging beach suggests, the Larvotto is regularly resurfaced: reprofiling in spring 2024 from April 15 to May 3, then from March 31 to May 7, 2025, the swell having each time accentuated the slope during the winter. Swimming is then prohibited in the coves, but the beach remains accessible in sections and the seafront shops do not close.
Added to this are seasonal issues: weekly analyzes of bathing water, anti-jellyfish net from June 1st, “Monaco Zero Mégot” operation, seasonal surveillance. And the substantive issues: the lighting of the lower part of the promenade, requested by traders for several years, was only launched in November 2025 for commissioning in 2026, the architect’s agreement conditioning the slightest intervention.
Why we archive it
A beach is a place that everyone thinks they know and that no one documents: work follows one another, the morphology of the sand changes, the protection devices age, and the memory of these decisions is lost. Memoria preserves this chronology – dates, clients, sources – so that Larvotto is not just a setting, but a documented territory.
Each archive in this sheet is dated and linked to a public source. The facts are paraphrased; only titles, media, dates and links to publishers are included, with their mention. A document, a photograph, a correction? Write to Memoria.