Lomography

Saint Tropez (France)
written by vicuna on May 15th, 2009 , 5 comments (6 votes)

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If you like touristic overcrowded and expensive places go visit St Tropez in full summer: a real nightmare!! You’ll need hours before reaching the city, you’ll find no place to park and if it will cost you a lot of money, hotels, restaurants and beaches are full of people and all is over expensive…. well, that what St Tropez looks like in summer, from June to September. So, simply avoid the place in this season.

BUT, the place has many charms and is worth a visit, when all the tourists are gone. So, from autumn to spring, you can really enjoy the visit to this nice little city without the problems of the summer time.

First of all, when you arrive by the only coastal road, you are amazed by the beauty of the bay of St Tropez. It’s a dreamy place in fact, and the problem is that everyone knows it and want to live there…. Park your car in the center of the city (and that’s not a problem before and after summer) and walk through the old city from the charming market place towards the port of St Tropez. It’s a quiet place in fact, the 5000 people who live there enjoy it before the massive tourists invasion that begins in July…

From the port, go through the old city again and follow the way up towards the castle of St Tropez. This castle was built in the XVIth century and was one of the most important military places of this area, saw a lot of battles, was taken, destroyed, re-built many times during the following centuries. Nowadays, you can visit it (2€ entry fee) and have a walk in the beautiful park surrounding the castle. From there you can have a great view over the whole bay and the city of St Tropez.

Until the 1950’s, St Tropez was in fact a very quiet place, but when the first movie & song stars (Brigitte Bardot was one of them) discovered the place and bought a house there, the attractiveness and celebrity of the place changed: every new star wanted to buy a house there and a lot of tourists came there to see the stars. And thus, a lot of movies were realized in St Tropez, giving the city a new kind of attractive… and transform it in a kind of big summer circus of tourists and famous people…

So, avoid St Tropez in the summer, but enjoy it in any other season!