Monte Carlo, Monaco.

Some places are interesting because you can’t quite see the point of them. Not quite the case with Monaco but still it’s puzzling as a... town? Country? Principality? What even is it? And why is Topshop boss Sir Philip Green everywhere you look? Oh, tax reasons. Now we remember.

A playground for the super-rich is part of what Monaco is for and as you fly in on your helicopter from Nice airport (a car is almost as quick taking under half an hour, but this is Monaco, baby!), you see it clinging to mountains with even higher snow-capped mountains behind, every bit like Hong Kong, an outbreak of high-rises in the middle of nowhere. And yet somehow it’s not modern at all.

In the 1860s this was just a bunch of orange and lemon trees and then someone had the bright idea – with gambling being illegal across Europe – of building a casino. And a star was born. A big rich, tax-exempt, high-roller of a star.

The Casino – as featured in the Bond film Casino Royale, which was actually filmed somewhere else entirely – is still there, still operational and still bemusing. Built in the Belle Époque style (which basically means over-the-top fancy), it dominates and defines Monte Carlo, which is a district of the tiny twokilometre-wide Principality of Monaco. Everyone gets confused about that so don’t worry about it.

Thanks to the success of the casino and because people didn’t want to be schlepping in from Nice, the Hôtel de Paris was created. Grand, lavish even, it’s recently had a multi-million-pound makeover to make it, if anything, even grander and more lavish, with a newly created courtyard meaning all rooms have views though you can always tell a gambler, apparently, because they request a view of the casino itself, just in case it slips away in the night.

At the top of the Hôtel de Paris is a Michelin-starred restaurant looking out across the whole – what was it? Principality? – while downstairs is a snooky little jazz bar where you can listen to great musicians while women in dresses that would pay our rent for the rest of the decade shamelessly selfie themselves right up in the musicians’ faces. Which is rude, right?

Across the square is the Café de Paris, where the wives and lovers of the high rollers used to wait, hoping for a windfall. The whole area between the Casino and the Hôtel de Paris, with its reflective Anish Kapoor sculpture, is the latest project: they’re getting it ready to be an outdoor music venue with Céline Dion its first superstar.

Walking from the Hôtel de Paris through a new development called One Monaco, an elegant grove of rounded high-rises with Chanel and Dior and, OK, Zara at street level, you get to Hôtel Hermitage, the grande dame of Monte Carlo’s hotels, one that manages to be straight-up fabulous and friendly all at the same time.

Rooms – again recently refurbished: there seems to be no end to the money here – look out across the superyachts in the marina and up to the Royal Palace in the old town where Princess Grace, the artist formerly known as Hollywood movie star Grace Kelly, used to rule the roost and is now buried.

Back at Hôtel Hermitage, where the spa is multi-storey and you can have a healthy snack by the indoor pool no matter the weather, there’s a beautiful coloured-glass dome designed by the man who did the Eiffel Tower (Gustave Eiffel, would you believe?) where you can have your breakfast as well as a lightdrenched restaurant called Le Vistamar, where the food is as fabulous as the surroundings. And if you get one of the suites at the front, you can watch the world-famous Grand Prix as it tears up the town.

But it’s inside that Casino that you’ll really want a snoop, because it’s weird, mixing hands-down old-school glamour with Vegas-style oversize slot machines. Apparently, the private rooms are the places to be seen but we lurk around the public tables with our €20 chips, which we lose immediately, while multi-millionaires squander entire fortunes in the blink of an eye without even blinking their eyes. They are a weird lot, those multi-millionaires. Maybe you don’t care what you look like when you have that sort of money.

Also in the Casino is Le Train Bleu, a restaurant from the 1920s that was built to look like a carriage from the Orient Express and which is dark and sexy and loaded with art deco. The menu comes on a huge newspaper-like publication but they will pretty much do anything you ask here. ‘Just tell us what you really want,’ says the waitress like someone who misheard a Spice Girls lyric as she returns to an elderly woman on the next table who has had so much surgery she can not only NOT eat but her whole face seems to be pulling her forward onto the table.

If there’s one thing you can say about Monaco – sorry Monte Carlo: they weren’t the same thing, were they? – is that it’s world-class when it comes to people-watching. Even if one of those people is often Sir Philip Green.