Tourist information -
Saint Tropez
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. 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 rest
as they say is history!
In season St-Tropez stays up late, as you'd expect. You can spend
the evening trying on fancy clothes in the amazing array of couturier
shops; the boules games on place des Lices continue till well after
dusk; and the portside spectacle doesn't falter till the early hours.
If you're mad enough to want to pay to see - and be seen with -
the nightlife creatures of St-Tropez, clubs include Les Caves du
Roy , in the flashy Hôtel Byblos on rue Paul-Signac (the most
expensive and exclusive); L'Esquinade, on rue du Four, which has
been going strong since Bardot was young; and the gay disco Le Pigeonnier,
13 rue de la Ponche. All are open every night in summer, and usually
Saturday only in winter.
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