The origins of St-Tropez are unremarkable: a little fishing village that grew up around a port founded by the Greeks of Marseille,
which was destroyed by the Saracens in 739 and finally fortified in the
late Middle Ages. Its sole distinction from the myriad other fishing
villages along this coast was its inaccessibility. Stuck out on the
southern shores of the Golfe de St-Tropez,
away from the main coastal routes on a wide peninsula that never
warranted real roads, St-Tropez could only easily be reached by boat.
This held true as late as the 1880s, when the novelist Guy de Maupassant sailed his yacht into the port during his final high-living binge before the onset of syphilitic insanity.
Soon after de Maupassant's fleeting visit, the painter and leader of the neo-Impressionists, Paul Signac, was sailing down the coast when bad weather forced him to moor in St-Tropez. He instantly decided to build a house there, to which he invited his friends. Matisse was one of the first to accept, with Bonnard, Marquet, Dufy, Dérain, Vlaminck, Seurat and Van Dongen following suit, and by the eve of World War I St-Tropez was pretty well established as a hangout for bohemians. The 1930s saw a new influx of artists, this time of writers as much as painters: Cocteau, Colette and Anaïs Nin, whose journal records "girls riding bare-breasted in the back of open cars". In 1956 Roger Vadim arrived to film Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu Créa la Femme.
The international cult of Tropezian sun, sex and celebrities took off -
even the 1960s hippies who flocked to the revamped Mediterranean Mecca
of liberation managed to look glamorous - and the resort has been
big-money mainstream ever since.
Beware of coming to St-Tropez in high summer, unless by yacht and with limitless credit. The road from Le Foux
has traffic jams as bad as Nice or Marseille; the pedestrian jams to
the port are not much better; the hotels and restaurants are full and
very expensive; overnighting in vehicles is prohibited; the beaches are
not the cleanest... So save your visit, if you can, for a spring or
autumn day, and you'll understand why this place has had such history
and such hype.
The Vieux Port, with the old town rising above the eastern quay, is where you'll get the classic St-Tropez experience:
the quayside café clientele face-à-face with the yacht-deck martini
sippers and the latest fashions parading in between, defining the
French word frimer, which means to stroll ostentatiously in places like
St-Tropez. It's surprising just how entertaining this spectacle can be.
Up from the port, at the end of quai Jean-Jaurès, you enter place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, with the Château Suffren, originally built in 980 by Count Guillaume 1er of Provence (occasionally hosting art exhibitions), and the very pretty Mairie. A street to the justify leads down to the rocky baie de la Glaye;
while, straight ahead, rue de la Ponche passes through an ancient
gateway to place du Revelin above the fishing port and its tiny beach.
Turning inland and upwards, struggling past continuous shop-fronts,
stalls and café tables, you finally reach the open space around the sixteenth-century citadel.
Its maritime museum (daily: mid-June to mid-Sept 10am-6pm; rest of year
10am-5pm) is not much fun, but the walk round the ramparts on an
overgrown path has the best views of the gulf and the back of the town
- views that have not changed since their translations in oil onto
canvas before the war.
Some of these paintings you can see at the marvellous Musée de l'Annonciade,
in the deconsecrated sixteenth-century chapel on place
Georges-Grammont, just west of the port (Wed-Sun: Jan-May, Oct &
Dec 10am-noon & 3-6pm; June-Sept 10am-noon & 3-7pm; €3.81). It
was originally Signac's idea to have a permanent exhibition space for
the neo-Impressionists and Fauvists who painted here, though it was not
until 1955 that the collections of various inpiduals were put
together. The Annonciade features works by Signac, Matisse
and most of the other artists who worked here: grey, grim, northern
views of Paris, Boulogne and Westminster, and then local, brilliantly
sunlit scenes by the same brush - a real delight and unrivalled outside
Paris for the 1890-1940 period of French art.
The other pole of St-Tropez's life, south of the Vieux Port, is place des Lices.
The café-brasseries have become a bit too Champs-Elysées in style, and
a new commercial block has been added near the northern corner, but you
can still sit on benches in the shade of sad but surviving plane trees
and watch the boules games.
Copyright Rough Guides Ltd as trustee for its authors. Published by Rough Guides.
All rights reserved.The Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd.
