An Expert's View Of ST Tropez

Anthony Peregrine offers tips on exploring the first resort of the rich and famous.

Why go? Saint-Tropez is, quite simply, the most famous resort in Europe – and it was attracting the artistic and dissolute long before Brigitte Bardot’s time. The pointillist Paul Signac led them in from the late 19th century and, by the 1940s and 50s, the village was a summertime extension of the Parisian Left Bank: Juliette Greco, Boris Vian, Sartre and Picasso. Then Bardot appeared in And God Created Woman, transforming localised libertinage into a worldwide reputation for illicit pleasures. The place never looked back.

The great, the rich and the A-listers still tack in by the yachtful, meeting for villa soirées, in Le Club 55 on Pampelonne beach or at the Hotel Byblos’s Les Caves du Roy nightclub. If they weren’t there, the charming little village streets would not have quite so many yacht charter firms, top-end estate agencies, ferociously expensive restaurants and big-ticket designer boutiques.

In the wake of the A-listers comes any amount of flotsam and jetsam, whose obsession with air-headed extravagance can get on the nerves. But the well-heeled, scarcely-dressed, harebrained excess is vital to keeping Saint-Tropez in the planetary spotlight.

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