St Tropez,
Without the Traffic

The D98 and the D559 funnel every car on the coast onto two lanes built for a fishing village — not for a town that doubles in size on a summer weekend. I have watched that drive add an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, each way. People lose half their day to a windshield. So I don't drive into St Tropez. Not directly, not in season. Here is what I do instead.

The ferry play

I drive clients to Sainte-Maxime, the town directly across the bay. From the port there, the Bateaux Verts ferry crosses to St Tropez in about fifteen minutes — flat water, no queue, dropping you right at the Vieux Port, the old harbour at the centre of everything. While you are on the boat, I drive around the gulf and meet you on the other side. You skip the worst stretch of road on the entire Riviera; I deal with it without you in the car. By the time the traffic would have had you gritting your teeth, you are already on the quay watching the yachts.

That is the whole trick. Most guides won't tell you, because most guides just sit in the line with you and call it part of the experience.

What St Tropez actually is

Once you're there, forget the postcard. The real St Tropez is small. The Vieux Port is the heart of it — not the beach, the harbour, where fishing boats and hundred-metre yachts tie up nose to nose and nobody finds that strange. Behind it, the old town climbs in ochre and pink up to the Citadelle, the sixteenth-century fortress on the hill with the best view over the gulf you'll get all day.

The square to aim for is the Place des Lices. Tuesday and Saturday mornings it's a proper Provençal market — produce, linen, the usual beautiful clutter. The rest of the week it's plane trees, café tables, and old men playing pétanque in the dust, completely indifferent to whoever's famous this week. That contrast is the town: superyachts on one side, a boules game on the other.

Then there's Pampelonne — four kilometres of sand south of town, and the address for the beach clubs everyone's heard of. Club 55, Nikki Beach, the rest. If you want that, I'll set it up. If you'd rather have lunch in the old town and skip the scene, that's the better day in my opinion. It isn't mandatory. Nothing here is.

Port Grimaud — the part nobody plans for

The stop that surprises people most comes at the end. Port Grimaud sits at the head of the gulf: a marina village built from scratch in the 1960s on a lagoon, designed so that every house has water at its door. Canals instead of streets, coloured facades, boats moored to the front step. People call it the Venice of Provence — a phrase I usually distrust, except here it's close to fair. You can walk it in an hour, or take a small water taxi through the canals and see it the way it was meant to be seen: from the water, in the late light, after the day-trippers have gone and the colours go soft. It's the right note to end on after the noise of St Tropez.

Optional: a vineyard on the way

The Var is wine country — the heart of Provence rosé — and if the timing's right, I'll fold in a stop at a vineyard between the coast and the gulf. A tasting, a look at the cellars, half an hour out of the car. Entirely optional, entirely down to the mood of the day.

A day, roughly