Five days into our stay in Lorgues we had explored the village pretty well, and decided to take our first trip to the “seaside”. Saint-Tropez dates back to pre-Roman times, and with its natural harbour and ideal defensive position, has, over the ages, often been fought over, and has been under the control of many different peoples including Greeks from Phocaea, Romans, Saracens and Genoans, Germans during the Great War, and Italians and, again, Germans in the second World War. It is also believed to have been where the first contact occurred between the French and the Japanese, when, in 1615, a Japanese delegation on its way to Rome, was obliged by the weather to take shelter in La Golfe de Saint-Tropez. And interestingly, the name Saint Tropez, comes from “Torpes”, a Roman officer under Nero’s reign who was beheaded after making the mistake of being converted to Christianity by Saint Paul; his body was set adrift in a small boat in Pisa, together with a cat and a dog, and supposedly they drifted ashore in this sheltered cove.
In more recent times, Saint-Tropez attracted famous figures from the world of fashion such as Coco Chanel in the 1920s, it was one of the landing sites for the Allied invasion of Southern France in August 1944, and in the 1950s gained some renown as the location for Roger Vadim’s film “And God Created Woman” that launched Brigitte Bardot into the public spotlight.
And since then it has become very much a destination for the rich and famous, an image which justifies the exotic boutiques we found throughout the town, and the beautiful luxury yachts moored along the quay in the small harbour.
The 52km scenic route across the Massif des Maures gave us a slow, but exciting drive through some lovely countryside, along a road of many twists and turns and lots of steep drops, most of which were on the passenger side, to Celine’s slight concern. Although the town now predominantly conveys the feeling of opulent luxury, the highlight for us was a visit to the fascinating Musée Maritime, which gave us a very different perspective of the history of Saint-Tropez. Climbing the hill upwards from the port, and passing several busy restaurants that teased your scribe’s taste buds, we arrived at the foot of a long set of steps leading up to La Citadelle on top of Colline des Moulins.
The first fort was built there in 1589 but was destroyed just six years later. The imposing hexagonal keep and the bastioned outer wall that we see today, were constructed in the early seventeenth century. The tower encloses a large interior courtyard and houses the maritime museum, a dozen rooms in which one discovers the maritime heritage of Saint Tropez from antiquity to the modern-day. The beautifully presented collection of ship and boat models, engravings, paintings of boats and documents recording the lives of famous local people, sea-captains and adventurers, kept us enthralled for a couple of hours. It was fascinating reading extracts from the letters to his wife, sent by the captain of a coastal sailing ship, as he tried to maintain his schedule in spite of the vagaries of the weather. Lying on our backs in a darkened corner of another room and watching a video of the terrors of life aboard one of the last of the old sailing ships on the passage round Cape Horn with cargoes of nickel from New Caledonia, was a relaxing novelty for two sets of weary legs. And it inspired us to stop in the museum shop on the way out and buy “Carnets du Cap Horn”, the journals of Pierre Stephan, one of the brave young captains who, at the turn of the twentieth century, still preferred the rigours of life aboard a four-masted barque to the comforts of the steamships of the day. The friendly Museum staff themselves made our visit complete when, quite out of the blue, they offered us free cups of coffee as we chatted with them and browsed the bookshelves.
Eventually, pangs of hunger obliged us to return down the hill in the late afternoon, passing the now-closed restaurants with the tasty-looking menus, and we stopped at a small crêperie to eat very moreish Grand Marnier crêpes. This kept us going nicely for a while as we ambled through the narrow streets leading down to the sea. Being the good tourists that we were, who had yet to get used to French eating hours and afternoon closures, we eventually feasted cheaply on paella and escargots in one of the few quayside restaurants that stayed open all day.
The old town of Saint-Tropez seems small and intimate which added to our enjoyment of this out-of-season visit, without the hoards of tourists that we are told flood the place “in the season”. We wandered through some of the many charming small streets behind the old port, down to the pretty little La Ponche beach where a twenty-first century Dad flew a kite for his toddler, and then onto the concrete remains of a large concrete jetty sticking uglily out into the well protected Golfe de Saint-Tropez, where a young boy was trying his luck with rod and line on the edge of a darkening sea under threatening grey clouds. It was easy to imagine what the town must have been like when it was a small undeveloped village, the home of fishermen, boatbuilders, sailors and captains, many of the latter having learnt their trade at the local School for Captains.
In stark contrast, the tall wooden masts of classic sailing yachts and the gleaming superstructures of megayachts, moored stern-on to the quay around the main port, itself encircled by fading four-storey dwellings, on the cast-iron balustraded balconies of which, sat several comfortable-looking elderly residents, together with the 4km of clean sandy beach just outside of town facing the Mediterranean on the other side of the peninsular, gave credence to understanding why the rich and famous adopted the town for their summer pleasure ground.
It also left us wondering how it would compare with the big casino cities further east on the Côte d’Azur proper, Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo. But they would have to wait for our visit; before that we wanted to get a picture of everyday Provençal life, away from the razzamatazz of commercialized tourism, and for the next few days we concentrated our explorations on the many beautiful old villages to be found in the rolling countryside of Var and up into the hills towards Gorges du Verdon. . .