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The origins of St Tropez are unremarkable: a little fishing village that grew up around a port founded by the Greeks of Marseille, which was destroyed by the Saracens in 739 and finally fortified in the late Middle Ages. Its sole distinction from the myriad other fishing villages along this coast was its inaccessibility. Stuck out on the southern shores of the Golfe de St-Tropez, away from the main coastal routes on a wide peninsula that never warranted real roads, St-Tropez could only easily be reached by boat. This held true as late as the 1880s, when the novelist Guy de Maupassant sailed his yacht into the port. Soon after de Maupassant's fleeting visit, the painter and leader of the neo-Impressionists, Paul Signac, was sailing down the coast when bad weather forced him to moor in St-Tropez. He instantly decided to build a house there, to which he invited his friends. Matisse was one of the first to accept, with Bonnard, Marquet, Dufy, Dérain, Vlaminck, Seurat and Van Dongen following suit, and by the eve of World War I St-Tropez was pretty well established as a hangout for bohemians. The rest as they say is history!
In season St-Tropez stays up late, as you'd expect. You can spend the evening trying on fancy clothes in the amazing array of couturier shops; the boules games on place des Lices continue till well after dusk; and the portside spectacle doesn't falter till the early hours. If you're mad enough to want to pay to see - and be seen with - the nightlife creatures of St-Tropez, clubs include Les Caves du Roy , in the flashy Hôtel Byblos on rue Paul-Signac (the most expensive and exclusive); L'Esquinade, on rue du Four, which has been going strong since Bardot was young; and the gay disco Le Pigeonnier, 13 rue de la Ponche. All are open every night in summer, and usually Saturday only in winter.
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