Holidays in Monaco

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Monaco

Eleven Fifty-Five, Without Exception

Since 8 December 1817, when the Prince's Carabinieri were first formed to guard the Palace, the changing of the guard on the Place du Palais has taken place at precisely 11:55 in the morning, seven days a week, in white uniforms through the summer and black through the winter. The ritual has proven remarkably resistant to interruption. During the First World War, when most of the Carabinieri were mobilised into the French army, the Palace continued to be watched over by Monegasques and retired riflemen dressed in plain civilian clothes rather than uniform, so that the guard itself changed even when almost nothing about it looked the same. During the COVID-19 restrictions of 2020, the daily ceremony was for the first time in its recorded history moved inside the Palace grounds, performed without the public present and without full dress uniform, before returning to its usual spot in front of the gates once restrictions eased.

What makes the custom distinctive is less the ceremony itself, echoed by palace guards from London to Stockholm, than its stubborn precision: nearly two centuries on, the changeover is still fixed to a five-minute-to-noon slot rather than the rounder hour that most public rituals eventually drift toward, a small daily reminder, repeated some seventy thousand times since 1817, that has quietly outlasted world wars, occupations and pandemics.

Borrowing Paris's Clock

Monaco's own legal clock is younger than the Palace guard by nearly a century. From 28 March 1911, the principality adopted Paris Mean Time as its official standard, the same offset France itself had only just formalised in law that year after decades of resisting the Greenwich meridian, keeping Monaco's civil and railway time tied to the French capital rather than to its own geographic position on the Mediterranean coast. That arrangement lasted until after the Second World War, when Monaco, like France, shifted its clocks to Central European Time, an hour ahead of the earlier standard, a change it has kept ever since. Because the principality has no railways, airports or telegraph offices of its own separate from France's network, its adoption of a given legal time has, in practice if not in law, always followed the decisions taken just across its borders rather than being independently argued out at home.

A Square Watch Named for a Street Circuit

On 3 March 1969, the Swiss watchmaker Heuer, working alongside Breitling and Hamilton under the code name Project 99, unveiled one of the first self-winding chronograph movements ever brought to market, the calibre 11. To house it, the company's chief executive Jack Heuer commissioned an entirely new case shape from the manufacturer Piquerez, square rather than round, made possible by a newly patented waterproofing technique that had not previously worked on anything but circular cases. Heuer named the resulting watch after the Monaco Grand Prix, hoping to borrow some of the glamour of the world's most famous street circuit for a design that, on its 1969 launch, drew as much skepticism as admiration.

The watch owes its lasting fame less to its movement than to a single film role. In 1970, while shooting the racing picture Le Mans, Steve McQueen asked to wear the same equipment used by his friend, the Swiss driver Jo Siffert, who was sponsored by Heuer at the time; the blue-dialled, square-cased Monaco that appeared on McQueen's wrist on screen the following year turned a watch that had struggled commercially into one of the most recognisable chronographs ever made, still sold today under the name of a principality that had nothing to do with designing it, only with lending it a name.

Frequently Asked Questions