Saint-Tropez

Pliny the Elder recorded the place in antiquity as Athenopolis, a possession of Greek Marseille, and in 31 BC the Romans invaded the region. The town takes its name from Torpes, an early Christian martyr whose headless body, legend says, drifted ashore here in a boat with a rooster and a dog. From 890 to 972 the area was held from the Muslim stronghold of Fraxinet, until the Count of Provence began attacking them in 976 and in 980 built a tower where the Suffren tower now stands.

Saint-Tropez was refounded in 1470, when the Genoese gentleman Raphaël de Garezzio arrived with settlers from the Italian Riviera in return for exemption from tax; walls and two towers from that time still stand. The town became a small self-governing republic with its own fleet and militia, which beat off a Spanish fleet in June 1637, and a citadel was built above it from the 1590s. Louis XIV ended its tax privileges in 1672. Its shipyards built tartanes and three-masted ships, and the port lived from fishing and from trade in cork, wine and wood.

Paul Signac arrived in 1892 and drew Matisse, Bonnard, Marquet and others after him; pointillism and fauvism both developed here. Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli came in the 1920s. On 15 August 1944 Operation Dragoon landed on this coast, and Saint-Tropez was the first town on it to be liberated, though the German army dynamited its quays. In 1956 And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot, made the town internationally famous, and the Gendarme comedies with Louis de Funès followed from 1964.

Saint-Tropez holds a lasting place in the history of modern painting. Signac's arrival turned the fishing village into a gathering place for Neo-Impressionist and Fauve painters, a story told through the collection of the Musée de l'Annonciade, and later artists such as Bernard Buffet and David Hockney also lived and worked here. Painters returned again and again to the harbour and the Place des Lices, where the Café des Arts was a meeting place between 1890 and 1940.

Cinema and pop music made the town a myth in the 1950s and 1960s. The New Wave film-makers, the singers of the yé-yé years and Brigitte Bardot brought international jet-setters in their wake, and the Gendarme films turned the town's battles over topless bathing into comedy; the old gendarmerie is now a museum of cinema. The town has since appeared in many songs, films and television series.

Beneath the glamour, old traditions persist. The Bravades in May, held for more than 450 years, honour Saint Torpes with musket salutes and costumed militias, and a second bravade in June recalls the 1637 victory over the Spanish fleet. Pétanque is often played under the plane trees of the Place des Lices, and the Voiles de Saint-Tropez regatta at the end of September keeps the port's sailing tradition alive.

Saint-Tropez had about 3,600 residents in 2023, a figure that fell by nearly a fifth between 2017 and 2023. The resident town is tiny compared with the summer crowds, and in July and August the roads into it are routinely jammed.

Tourism is the main economy — hotels, restaurants, beach clubs, boutiques, yacht services and the regattas. The commercial port that once built three-masted ships has become a harbour of about 800 berths for pleasure boats and ferries, and fashion boutiques have traded beside the harbour since the 1950s. Around the old centre, small flats and houses give way, on the peninsula towards Ramatuelle, to large private villas.

The town keeps a village rhythm outside summer: more than a thousand pupils in its schools, pétanque on the square, the market and the cafés of the harbour. In season the harbour, the beaches and the clubs stay busy late into the night.

The town's own sweet is the tarte tropézienne, a halved brioche filled with a mix of crème pâtissière and buttercream and topped with pearl sugar. The Polish-born pastry cook Alexandre Micka, who settled in Saint-Tropez after the Second World War, first made it in the early 1950s; Brigitte Bardot took a liking to it while filming And God Created Woman and suggested the name, which Micka registered as a trademark in 1973. His original shop still trades.

Beyond that, Saint-Tropez eats like the rest of Provence: olive oil, garlic, tomatoes and herbs, fish from the gulf, and summer vegetables. Restaurants on the quays and around the Place des Lices serve Provençal and Mediterranean cooking, and the beach clubs of Pampelonne have their own long-lunch culture.

Côtes de Provence rosé, the region's best-known wine, is the usual summer drink. Pastis remains the aperitif of the café terraces, and Sénéquier by the port, founded in 1887, is a local institution.