From fishing village to Bardot's playground — glamour, rosé, and the old port at dawn
Saint-Tropez is two different places: the old Provençal fishing village of ochre and terracotta houses around a small harbour, with the Annonciade museum and Tuesday market still intact from before the celebrities arrived — and the summer playground of the European rich, where mega-yachts crowd the port and the beach clubs of Pampelonne charge more per day than most city hotels. The genius of Saint-Tropez is that both exist simultaneously. Brigitte Bardot arrived in 1956 to film And God Created Woman and never really left.
Saint-Tropez was a sleepy Provençal fishing village visited briefly by painter Paul Signac in 1892, who went home and told everyone — soon Matisse, Bonnard, and a parade of Post-Impressionists had spent summers there. The village's current identity was established by Roger Vadim's 1956 film featuring Brigitte Bardot, which made it synonymous with a new kind of sun-worshipping Mediterranean glamour. During WWII, Allied forces landed here on 15 August 1944 in Operation Dragoon — the D-Day of Provence — and the village's small naval museum records the liberation.