Musée de Préhistoire de Terra Amata — Attraction in Nice

It is such a difficult task to make archaeology exciting to us without life-sized relatable findings. But Terra Amata [Latin: beloved land] tries to present us a decent overview.

This place is walkable from Port Nice to the Mount Boron area. Built on the actual site of a Lower Paleolithic beach, it was excavated by Henry de Lumley in 1966.

There are presentation videos, detailed labels, 3D models -- all written in French. But you can ask at the reception for an English guidebook. It is free of charge, and you can return it after you've read it.

What is understood from this scholarly place is that Neandrthals were here, and thriving with huts, fire, stone tools, animal butchering. The excavations tell us what extinct animals roamed this area.

Time taken: 60 mins (mostly because of the...

This museum is so unique in that almost all the museum is based on excavations that happened at the exact site of the museum. The findings are of peoples who lived 400,000 and 380,000 years ago. The geological perspective regatding what the land looked like over the period of habitation are older and very effective. Plan to spend an hour to thoroughly enjoy the museum. The language is mostly French (very little English) and the displays are such that without knowing much French, they were easy to understand. We certainly saw the oldest stone tools we've seen so far in Europe at 400k years old. Note that this is an older museum and both my husband and I were delighted with...

It could be much better for sure. As there is no much potential for improvement a fair ticket price should be between EUR2 for kids and EUR5 for adults.

Overall, Nice city's new (2015) pricing policy for all of its museums is not fair and it has to be reviewed. There might be a significant loss from EU's subsidies, but each museum should be evaluated separately. The cost of EUR10 doesn't correspond to 1 min walk throughout the Terra Amata museum. I did visit it because of its significance, but for that price I really should have visited any other museums instead.

I hope to see some development in the city's pricing policy, as its...