Saint-Tropez

I’ll admit we arrived in Saint-Tropez a little primed to be unimpressed — it’s the kind of place whose reputation precedes it so thoroughly that the actual town almost can’t win. And for the first hour, wandering past boutiques with no prices displayed and restaurants charging what we’d normally budget for three days, the cynicism held. Then the evening light hit the harbour, the yachts started their nightly parade of reverse-parking for an audience of café tables, and it became, despite ourselves, genuinely entertaining.

The evening parade nobody officially organizes

Every evening around six, the harbourfront cafés along the Quai Jean Jaurès fill with people whose sole activity is watching yachts back into their berths, a process that apparently requires enough onlookers to justify itself as a spectator sport. We ordered a bottle of rosé we could barely afford and joined in without shame, rating the boats, inventing backstories for their owners, and generally behaving exactly like the crowd we’d been mocking two hours earlier.

Pampelonne, and the beach that isn’t about the beach

Pampelonne Beach, a few kilometres south of town, is where the Saint-Tropez of the 1960s — Bardot, the yacht set, the whole mythology — actually took shape, and it’s still lined with a handful of legendary beach clubs where a sunbed and lunch can cost more than most hotel rooms. We chose a quieter public stretch instead, laid our towels on soft pale sand that’s rarer than you’d think on this coast, and swam in water considerably calmer than the harbour scene back in town.

When to go: June or September, unless you enjoy paying August prices for a parking spot. Off-season, from October to April, the town empties out almost entirely and the harbour, they say, becomes a completely different — and much cheaper — place.