Monaco is a millionaire’s playground known for its lavish wealth, but is it outdated and ugly now?

At the end of September, I travelled for work from New York City to Monaco, a tiny yet lavishly wealthy city state on the French Riviera.

Monaco is a peculiar place. It’s been called a playground for millionaires – an estimated one-third of its roughly 38,000 residents are millionaires. It’s smaller than New York City’s Central Park. Each year, it plays host to glamorous events such as the Monaco Grand Prix and the Monaco Yacht Show, which attract wealthy visitors from all over the world to the already highly affluent principality.

I attended this year’s Monaco Yacht Show, where I boarded multimillion-dollar superyachts, toured luxury hotels and spent a lot of time running around Monaco.

Cities on the famously scenic Mediterranean coast, from Portofino to Santorini, are known for their beauty. And while beauty is, of course, subjective, I have to say, I found Monaco quite ugly.

Monaco is full of ugly, outdated architecture

From a distance, such as from out on a yacht in the harbour – a view I was lucky enough to get – Monaco is vaguely pretty, with its background of dramatic, rocky hills.

But up close, I found it to be straight-up ugly.

I think Lonely Planet summed it up well: “Despite its prodigious wealth, Monaco is far from being the French Riviera’s prettiest town. World-famous Monte Carlo is basically an ode to concrete and glass, dominated by high-rise hotels, superyachts and apartment blocks that rise into the hills like ranks of dominoes, plonked into an utterly bewildering street layout seemingly designed to confound lowly pedestrians.”

With a few exceptions such as its iconic Beaux Arts casino and palm trees that make everything look a little nicer, Monaco’s famous Monte Carlo district was not particularly attractive.