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
Where to Stay
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.
Airelles Saint-Tropez, Château de la Messardière.
Airelles Saint-Tropez, Château de la Messardière
Como Le Beauvallon
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.
Como Le Beauvallon.
Como Le Beauvallon
Arev St. Tropez
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, with a second pool and 11 new suites. The mood is pure members’ club: a padel court, the Maison S.T. spa, a bar called Q’s done up like an officers’ wardroom and a small fleet of vintage Méhari and Citroën H-vans idling out front for the two-minute hop to Place des Lices.
Arev St. Tropez.
Arev St. Tropez
Hôtel Byblos
20 Avenue Paul Signac, 83990 Saint-Tropez
Lebanese magnate Jean-Prosper Gay-Para built Byblos in 1967 to lure Brigitte Bardot, who married Gunter Sachs that same summer instead and left him to sell the place in a sulk. Reopened for the season on April 22, the 86-room village—47 of them suites—now counts eight new Laura Gonzalez suites in coral, celadon and soft yellow, four reworked Bastide rooms, a fresh Sisley spa floor and a new chef firing the grill at Byblos Beach. Downstairs, Les Caves du Roy still throbs on the spot where Mick and Bianca Jagger married in 1971, and the rooftop Skybar—the first in the hotel’s nearly 60 years—pours all summer.
Hôtel Byblos.
alexis anice
Hôtel Lou Pinet
70 Chemin du Pinet, 83990 Saint-Tropez
Maisons Pariente’s village darling has the design world still talking. Charles Zana dressed the 34 rooms in linen, terracotta, rope and ceramic, with sly nods to Matisse, Cocteau and Calder, while the landscaper Jean Mus turned the grounds into a parasol-pine jungle. Beefbar by Riccardo Giraudi works one of the largest pools in the village, and down the garden path, the spa belongs to Tata Harper, the Vermont skincare label, the whole grotto wafting with her herbal tinctures.
Hôtel Lou Pinet.
Hôtel Lou Pinet
Épi Baie de Pampelonne
1128 Chemin de l’Épi, 83350 Ramatuelle
A 1959 holdover of just nine bungalows that once cradled Bardot, Gainsbourg and Deneuve, the Épi has thrown in with Discovery Land Company, the outfit behind the Yellowstone Club, which bolted on an Outdoor Pursuits team, a stocked snack room and a velvet-rope exclusivity that nudges a beach hotel toward private compound. Guests get their own gate onto Pampelonne, two pools, two clay tennis courts, a Frédéric Fekkai salon and a Biologique Recherche spa.
Épi Baie de Pampelonne.
Épi Baie de Pampelonne
What to Do
La Citadelle and Musée d’Histoire Maritime
1 Montée de la Citadelle, 83990 Saint-Tropez
The hexagonal 17th-century keep above town hands Saint-Tropez a reason to climb the hill stone-cold sober. Inside the donjon, the maritime museum—open since 2013—tells the history the postcards skip: Tropézien sailors working the Ottoman Levant and rounding Cape Horn, an unflinching room on the town’s role in the slave trade and summer electronic music nights staged in the old dungeon.
La Citadelle and Musée d’Histoire Maritime.
La Citadelle and Musée d’Histoire Maritime
Musée de l’Annonciade
2 Place Georges Grammont, 83990 Saint-Tropez
The Annonciade is the surprise nobody expects to find a block off the yacht parade. A deconsecrated 16th-century chapel holds one of France’s great small hoards of Pointillism, Nabis and Fauvism—Signac, Matisse, Bonnard, Braque and Dufy, most of them painting the same light still bouncing off the harbor outside.
Musée de l’Annonciade.
Saint-Tropez Tourism
Place des Lices Market and Pétanque
Place des Lices, 83990 Saint-Tropez
Tuesday and Saturday mornings, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., this square heaves with Provençal linen, olives, fish and dealers’ antiques. The other five days, the gravel reverts to its rightful owners: old men flinging steel boules under plane trees a century old. The insider move is to talk Le Café—the brasserie that has held the southeast corner since 1789—into lending you a set; there’s a locked cabinet behind the bar reserved for regulars’ personal boules.
Place des Lices Market and Pétanque.
Getty Images/Brooks Kraft
L’Escalet and the Cap Taillat Coast Path
Plage de l’Escalet, 64 Promenade de la Baie de Bon, 83350 Ramatuelle
Here’s the civilian’s answer to Pampelonne: a half-sand, half-pebble cove where not one square inch is for rent, fenced off from developers since 1975. From the parking lot, a 2.2-mile coast path threads south to Cap Taillat, a wild spit of land lashed to the mainland by a single ribbon of sand. Haul yourself up to the Cap Camarat lighthouse, 426 feet above the water, and the view stretches east past Pampelonne and west toward the Porquerolles Islands.
L’Escalet and the Cap Taillat Coast Path.
Getty Images/Andia
The Best Beach Clubs
Le Club 55
43 Boulevard Patch, 83350 Ramatuelle
Going since 1955 and still the de Colmont family’s to lose, Club 55 stayed a lunch place when everything around it learned to throb after dark—no DJ booth, no bottle parade, half the plate grown at the family farm up the road and trucked down that morning. Tenders nose in off the bay all afternoon; hail the boatman on VHF Channel 17, and someone in a striped shirt comes to fetch you.
Le Club 55.
@laphotographesucreesalee
Bagatelle
470 Chemin de la Matarane, 83350 Ramatuelle
Rémi Laba and Aymeric Clemente carried the Bagatelle name over from a Meatpacking District dining room in the mid-2010s, lost the original concession in the 2019 reshuffle, then reopened in 2020 on the old Stefano Forever lot behind the dune—which is why the sign reads Bagatelle chez Stefano Forever. Clemente makes no secret of his model: La Voile Rouge, the topless-and-Cristal paillote that Paul Tomaselli ran until the state finally tore it down. What survives of that spirit here is the tuna tartare, the truffled roast chicken and a lunch that can linger to sunset.
Bagatelle.
Michael Pisarri
Nikki Beach
1093 Route de l’Épi, 83350 Ramatuelle
Jack Penrod opened it in 2002 as the first Nikki Beach in Europe, named for a daughter he lost young, and the place has never once feigned subtlety—inflatable flamingos bob in the only pool on the strip, the second seating tips from lunch into something closer to a wedding nobody planned, and Bob Sinclar turns up to work the decks. The kitchen offers sushi, a raw bar and the gluttonous Sexy Salad between bottles of Cristal. A 2024 gut renovation reset the layout without touching the volume.
Nikki Beach.
Nikki Beach
Verde Beach
1149 Chemin de l’Épi, 83350 Ramatuelle
Alex Bril’s Yeeels group put Verde on the sand in 2019, the same season the new concessions remade the beach, and it has since climbed most every shortlist of Pampelonne’s best—white sailcloth snapping overhead, a Moroccan shisha corner, the cooking out of École Ducasse kitchens. Lunch is burrata from Puglia and lobster linguine in a bisque with a slap of chili; then the parasols come down, the volume comes up, and a name like Guetta or Garrix takes the booth. Families graze early and clear out before the set. Reserve by WhatsApp, arrive by boat—if you can manage it.
Where to Shop
K. Jacques
39bis Rue Allard, 83990 Saint-Tropez
The original Tropézienne sandal was born in 1933 when Armenian refugees Jacques and Elise Keklikian set up a workshop in the village. Ninety-odd years on, it’s still in the family and still cut by hand in the back room, with more than 250 leathers on offer and a made-to-measure bench for the patient. Bardot wore them, Kate Moss wears them, and so does roughly everyone you’ll brush past on Rue Allard—the one mark against buying a pair, and a feeble one.
K. Jacques.
K. Jacques
By Marie
Place de la Garonne, 83990 Saint-Tropez
This is the concept shop the village actually buys from, as opposed to the luxury monoculture two streets over on Rue François Sibilli. Marie Gas—artistic director of the historic Marseille jeweler Gas Bijoux—opened it a quarter-century ago and packs it with independent and emerging French and Mediterranean names: Marie Lichtenberg, Selim Mouzannar and Ancient Greek Sandals, alongside one-off capsules and her own cashmere line, sold in her four shops and nowhere else.
By Marie.
By Marie
Marinette Saint-Tropez
4 bis, 29 and 30 Rue Georges Clemenceau, 83990 Saint-Tropez
Marinette and Joseph de Santis started with a single fabric stall on the Place des Lices market in 1963; three generations later, the clan occupies three side-by-side storefronts on Rue Clemenceau. They sell jacquard towels, block-printed cloths and hand-painted faience at number 4 bis, tableware at 30 and room scents at 29. Walk all three doors in 10 minutes, then surrender to the indigo print you’ll spend the flight home regretting you left behind.
Marinette Saint-Tropez.
Marinette Saint-Tropez
Maison ST Parfum
12 Rue de la Ponche, 83990 Saint-Tropez
The town’s one real perfumer, tucked into the old fishermen’s quarter of La Ponche, and not to be confused with the Fragonard satellite that day-trippers mistake for a maison. Lora B has been composing small-batch scents in Saint-Tropez and Grasse since 2014, unlicensed and unattached to any beauty conglomerate. The limited-edition BB nods at Bardot; Légende is the other cult bottle.
Maison ST Parfum.
Maison ST Parfum
Where to Eat
Cherry Saint-Tropez
22 Rue du Portalet, 83990 Saint-Tropez
At the calmer end of the port, Cherry is the Indie Group’s Italo-New York supper club, opened in 2023 with Oscar Aviles Santana, formerly of Zuma Dubai, on the pans. The food is New York with a Riviera tan: vodka rigatoni, lobster pasta, a Caesar that would pass muster on Mulberry Street. Order the Cherry Martini, let the soundtrack slide from dinner-jazz into vintage hip-hop, and find the speakeasy hidden upstairs for whatever comes next.
Cherry Saint-Tropez.
Cherry Saint-Tropez
La Réserve à la Plage
Route de l’Épi, Plage de Pampelonne, 83350 Ramatuelle
Blessedly free of the DJ and bottle parade, this is a Pampelonne lunch for grown-ups. Philippe Starck did the beach restaurant of La Réserve Ramatuelle as a sand-floored cabin that pretends not to be expensive, where Nicolas Cantrel cooks the line to menus shaped by Éric Canino of the two-star La Voile up the hill. The wood-fired grill, the day’s catch and vegetables pulled from the hotel’s own potager do the talking, across 75 sunbeds and not one ounce of scene.
La Réserve à la Plage.
La Réserve à la Plage
Maison Revka
17 Place du XVème Corps, 83990 Saint-Tropez
Come to Maison Revka for Slavic flourish in a rose-and-jasmine garden off Place des Lices. Corinne Sachot dressed the room like the salon of a Russian family that summered well, lush and theatrical and lit for dinners that stretch past midnight. The kitchen reworks Franco-Slavic classics with a heavy hand on the caviar, from smoked-salmon coulibiac and caviar linguine to tartare de bar, king crab salad and a potato millefeuille crowned with yet more caviar. The bar leans hard on Beluga Botanical vodka and keeps pouring till 2 a.m.
Maison Revka.
Maison Revka
Gigi Rigolatto
1050 Chemin des Barraques, 83350 Ramatuelle
Book ahead for a Dolce Vita daydream by designer Hugo Toro, kitted out in all woven furniture and hammocks and a pool you may never leave for the beach. There’s a Bellini Bar, the Ischia and Ponza cabanas, a Valmont wellness corner and a Gigi Circus to park the kids, the whole place scored to an all-Italian playlist. Eat family-style and share everything, from truffled arancini and spiny lobster spaghetti to a crab Caesar with a following of its own. Finish with a red-berry pavlova the size of a centerpiece.
Gigi Rigolatto.
Gigi Rigolatto
La Tarte Tropézienne
Place des Lices, Boulevard Vasserot, 83990 Saint-Tropez
The pastry that gave the town its sweetest export was dreamed up in 1955 by Polish baker Alexandre Micka: a split brioche hiding two clouds of cream under a crust of pearl sugar, its full recipe supposedly known to only three living people. Most day-trippers grab a box to go and never notice La Table Tropézienne, the tea room tucked upstairs at the flagship. Get a Baby Trop for the walk to the beach and a full-size one for whoever you abandoned back at the villa.
La Tarte Tropézienne.
La Tarte Tropézienne
Where to Drink
Sénéquier
29 Quai Jean Jaurès, 83990 Saint-Tropez
You have already seen the scarlet awning in a hundred photographs, because Sénéquier has been anchoring the quay since 1930, its lacquered chairs arranged to face the yachts like seats at a matinee. Pablo Picasso and Françoise Sagan once held court here, and the regulars have merely changed names to Sting and Armani. Richard Lafond’s renovation upgraded the institution into a serious brasserie-bar with a champagne list to match and operating hours that border on the deranged, from 7:30 a.m. to 3 a.m.
Sénéquier.
Sénéquier
Loulou Ramatuelle
1080 Chemin des Tamaris, Plage de Pampelonne, 83350 Ramatuelle
Paris Society hauled its Tuileries beach club south to the sand and gave it whitewashed wood, navy-striped parasols and a cellar of more than 100 labels tilted toward Corsica and small Italian growers. What distinguishes it from the rosé-on-rosé clubs along the same stretch is a bar that treats cocktails as a discipline rather than an afterthought, while chef Benoît Dargère keeps the Med-inspired plates coming.
Loulou Ramatuelle.
Ricard Romain
Mamé
98 Rue du Général Allard, 83990 Saint-Tropez
Mamé bills itself as Saint-Tropez’s first natural wine bar, doubling as a coffee counter and brunch room by day before dimming into a low-lamp listening bar after dark. The kitchen sends out French-Japanese small plates, the playlist leans unrepentantly toward hip-hop, and the pét-nat mimosa costs a fraction of a single glass back at Sénéquier.
Mamé.
Mamé
