The Town
France > Côte d'Azur > St-Tropez > The Town

Winter

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; and 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 left 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; mid-Sept to mid-June 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 individuals 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.