Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

The Insider’s Guide to Saint-Tropez, Beyond the Yacht Parade

Saint-Tropez has never lacked theater, but the real appeal this season is in its revived hotels, smarter beach clubs, tucked-away shops and stubbornly glamorous old town.

Few people know that ritzy Saint-Tropez is actually named for a decapitated Roman: Torpes, an officer under Nero, lost his head in Pisa around A.D. 68 and was set adrift in a boat with a rooster and a dog, which washed up here. The town that took his name stayed a sleepy fishing port for the better part of two millennia, until the painters found the light in the 1890s, Brigitte Bardot found a film set in 1956, and everyone else found Bardot.

After that, the town on the French Riviera never stopped growing: the starlets drew the photographers, who drew the money, which kept arriving in ever-bigger boats. Fewer than 5,000 people live here year-round, though by August that figure looks like a misprint, and the harbor that once reeked of fish now berths yachts worth more than the GDPs of small countries. The coast around it has become one long luxury playground, where day-trippers pour off the buses for a selfie and a gelato while the truly committed arrive by helicopter. People have been calling the town finished and even flat-out vulgar every September for decades, then turning up again every June to fight for a lunch table, which is partly why the locals gave up fretting about it long ago.

2026 is worth a fresh look, though not for the reason you'd expect. The coastal rewrite happened years ago: under France's Loi Littoral (coastal law), the Pampelonne beach clubs were pulled back from the waterline and rebuilt behind the dune line in lightweight, demountable form, the roster trimmed along the way. Club 55 held its ground while the rest moved, and the de Colmont family still—at least thus far—politely turns the fashion house collaborations away. What's new this year sits up the hill and across the water, in the hotels—addresses gone dark for years, reopened over the winter, rebuilt or in new hands. First-timers get the postcard and the real town behind it. The glamour survived, and this season, it even grew up a little.

The Ultimate Guide to Saint-Tropez

Airelles Saint-Tropez, Château de la Messardière

Épi Baie de Pampelonne

La Citadelle and Musée d'Histoire Maritime

Musée de l'Annonciade

Place des Lices Market and Pétanque

L'Escalet and the Cap Taillat Coast Path

Marinette Saint-Tropez

La Réserve à la Plage

Airelles Saint-Tropez, Château de la Messardière

2 Route de Tahiti, 83990 Saint-Tropez

The 19th-century palace on the ridge above town threw Gatsby-grade parties through the 1920s and has played Saint-Tropez's grande dame ever since. HBO has now cast it as the White Lotus du Cap for the show's fourth season, shot across the Riviera through 2026 with Cannes' Hôtel Martinez standing in for a second resort. Airelles took the keys in 2019 and reopened in July 2021 after a two-year rebuild by Christophe Tollemer: 86 rooms and suites over 32 hilltop acres, a Matsuhisa for the Nobu set, an Airelles spa with nine treatment rooms and the private Jardin Tropézina beach club down on Pampelonne.

Boulevard des Collines, 83310 Grimaud

The year's grandest resurrection sits across the water in Grimaud, a 1914 Belle Époque palace on a wooded hilltop that Audrey Hepburn and Winston Churchill knew before it went dark in 2008. Como threw the doors back open this April with 42 glass-and-white rooms by designer Dorothée Delaye and a private hoard of more than 300 artworks scattered across 10 acres of umbrella pine, from the gardens up to the 2,000-square-foot Como Suite.

8 Chemin des Vendanges, 83990 Saint-Tropez

A few blocks uphill from the harbor scrum, Arev is the address Tropéziens keep for themselves. Madrid's Luis Bustamante dressed it in a sailor's palette of navy, coral and white, equal parts 1960s yacht club and Almodóvar set, and since its 2024 debut, it has swelled to 35 keys,........

© Observer