The Americans who come back to Saint-Tropez a second time, a third time, a fifth time, eventually ask the same question. They ask it differently — what is around here, what would a local do, where do you actually go — but they are asking the same thing. They want the version of the gulf that does not require a reservation at Loulou.
That version exists. It is twelve miles long. It runs from the southern edge of the village, around the inner curve of the gulf, to the small beach at Beauvallon. It is not a secret. It is simply the part of the map that most first-time visitors never think to drive.
What follows is the route I send my clients on, in the order I send them, with the addresses they tend to come back to me about.
Day one — leave the village by the back
Take the small road south out of Saint-Tropez through Les Salins, not the main road through La Foux. The salt marshes on your left are protected. The vineyards in this part of the Var belong largely to the Domaines Ott group — the Clos Mireille white, half an hour further west toward La Londe, is one of the three best whites in Provence, and the bottle you buy now will go on the dinner table tonight.
Continue to Gassin, the small hilltop village twenty minutes inland from the coast. Park at the foot. Walk up. Lunch at the Bello Visto, on the terrace, with the view of the gulf below and the Maures behind. Order the pissaladière. Drink the Bandol rosé. Do not try to do anything else with the afternoon. Drive back to the village by the small road through Ramatuelle in the evening light.
Day two — the Gulf, by water
Charter a small boat for the morning — not a yacht, a sloop or a small motorboat with a single skipper — from the port of Saint-Tropez. Tell the skipper you want to go to the Pampelonne side until eleven and then cross the gulf toward Cavalière, on the far side of Cap Lardier. The water there is calmer, the calanques are smaller, and the lunch at Chez Jo on the Plage du Layet, accessible only by boat, is the lunch the Americans I work with talk about for years.
Bring two bottles of white from the Clos Mireille. Anchor at noon. Swim. Eat. Read. Be back in the port by six. The skipper will know.
Day three — Grimaud, by land
Take the small road north out of Cogolin to Grimaud, the perched village fifteen minutes inland, and do not stop in the lower town. Drive up. The medieval village is the most beautiful in the Gulf, and almost no one stays long enough to walk it. The chapel at the top is from the eleventh century. The small antique dealer at the foot of the citadel sells nineteenth-century Provençal furniture and the occasional pot from the Vallauris kilns. The lunch at La Bretonnière, on the small Place des Pénitents in the medieval village, is excellent and entirely undiscovered.
In the afternoon, drive ten minutes further inland to Port-Grimaud — the 1960s Venetian-style canal village built by François Spoerry, which most American visitors confuse with a kitsch development and which is, in fact, a masterpiece of post-war Mediterranean architecture. Take the small electric boat that tours the canals. It is forty-five minutes. It is, oddly, one of the loveliest things in the gulf.
Day four — Sainte-Maxime to Beauvallon
The drive from Saint-Tropez around the gulf to Sainte-Maxime is twenty minutes out of season, closer to forty in August. Most people never make it past Sainte-Maxime, and they should. The road that continues east — the D559 — passes through Beauvallon, a small enclave of Belle Époque villas and a single, almost private beach that the locals defend with the kind of discretion that, in the South of France, is the highest form of recommendation.
The beach is reached by a small wooden staircase from the road. The signature address on the beach is Beauvallon Sur Mer, the Yannick Alléno restaurant that reopened with COMO Le Beauvallon in April 2026 — simple grilled fish, terrace at the water's edge, the best view across the bay to Saint-Tropez. The sand is pale. The water is quiet. The afternoon is, by design, uneventful.
If you are staying for dinner, the address is Le Mas de Chastelas, an eighteenth-century mas converted into a hotel in the late 1960s, hidden in the pines above Gassin, where the dining room is set under a vine-covered terrace and the chef cooks the kind of Provençal food that has, almost everywhere else in the region, been replaced by something more ambitious and less good.
Day five — back to the village, properly
End the week where you started. Apéritif on the terrace of La Ponche at seven. Walk the small streets behind the port at sunset, which is the half-hour the village is closest to the way it looked when Brigitte Bardot first arrived. Dinner at L'Auberge des Maures, in the garden, with the magnum of Tibouren. Stay until they fold the napkins.
This is the gulf the Americans I work with come back for. Not the helicopter from Nice. Not the lunch at the beach club where the bottle is six hundred euros and the music is louder than the conversation. The other gulf — the slower one, the inland one, the one you drive at thirty kilometres an hour in May — is the one they remember.
I will send you the addresses, in person, when you write.
— Camille Vedy
