St. Tropez FranceCruise Port Guide

Saint-Tropez occupies a privileged position in the mythology of the French Riviera: a fishing village that reinvented itself in the 1950s and 1960s as the epicenter of Bardot-era hedonism, attracting artists, writers, and the international jet set to its sun-warmed quays and sheltered beaches. Today it remains one of the most glamorous small towns on the Mediterranean coast, a place where the harbor is crowded with superyachts that dwarf the original pastel-painted fishing boats, and where the narrow streets behind the old port fill in summer with a population that swells from just 4,000 permanent residents to over 100,000 visitors. The physical town is tiny and intensely picturesque: the Vieux Port, with its daily painted-boat reflections and café terraces, the Place des Lices with its Tuesday and Saturday morning market shaded by plane trees, and the 16th-century citadel on its hilltop commanding panoramic views of the gulf.

Saint-Tropez has no cruise pier — the harbor is far too shallow and intimate for large ships. All cruise passengers arrive by tender boat, which deposits them directly at the Vieux Port within steps of the town's core. This tender approach, while adding a nautical romantic quality to the arrival, also means that rough weather can cancel or delay tenders; the Mistral wind can funnel through the gulf with surprising force. The Musée de l'Annonciade, housed in a converted 16th-century chapel on the port, is one of France's finest small art museums: its collection of Post-Impressionist and Fauvist works includes paintings by Signac, Matisse, Bonnard, Derain, and Vlaminck, many of them depicting Saint-Tropez itself in its fishing-village era. Brigitte Bardot discovered the village while filming Roger Vadim's Et Dieu... Créa la Femme in 1956 and has lived here, in a villa outside town, ever since, establishing the association that still defines the town's brand.

Pampelonne Beach, three kilometers south of the village center, is the legendary expanse of sandy shoreline dotted with private beach clubs — Club 55, Nikki Beach, Bagatelle — that define the Saint-Tropez social scene from June to September. The beach is five kilometers long with sections of both private club (sun-bed rental required) and free public beach, and is accessible by shuttle bus or taxi from the center.