Before the yachts and the cinema, Saint-Tropez was a small fishing port on the quiet side of the Var, and a painter found it first. Paul Signac sailed in, stayed, and brought the others; the light off this particular bay turned half of modern French painting bright. The glamour came later — the village underneath it is still there.
I. The port and the old town
On the quay the yachts now line up where the fishing boats moored, and the painters once set their easels facing the same row of ochre and pink houses. Behind, the old quarter of La Ponche keeps its narrow lanes and little shingle beach, and the Citadelle on the hill looks down over the whole gulf.
“The painters came for the light, the world came for the painters, and the light is still free.”
II. The Place des Lices and the Annonciade
Inland, the Place des Lices is the village’s living room — a square of plane trees with a market on Tuesdays and Saturdays and a game of boules most evenings. By the port the Musée de l’Annonciade, in a deconsecrated chapel, holds the pointillists and Fauves who worked here — Signac, Bonnard, Matisse — and explains why they came.
III. The beaches and the gulf
The famous sand is not in the village but along the bay at Pampelonne, below the hill village of Ramatuelle — a long pale beach that made Saint-Tropez a byword in the 1950s. Out of season, walk the coast path round the peninsula for the vineyards, the umbrella pines and the gulf without the crowds.
