La Côted'Azur.

The old port of Saint-Tropez at dawn — fishing boats still moored alongside the superyachts, the quayside cafés setting up, the ochre and terracotta facades of the port buildings catching the early light from the east. The village was a quiet Provençal fishing port until 1956, when Roger Vadim filmed Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu... créa la femme on location here. The resulting publicity transformed Saint-Tropez into the defining image of French Riviera glamour. The fishing boats are still there in the morning. The €40 rosés are still there in the afternoon. Both are worth experiencing for completely different reasons.

A 5km arc of fine white sand and turquoise water sheltered from the mistral by the Saint-Tropez peninsula — the beach that defined beach culture for postwar Europe (Bardot on Pampelonne was the image in every European magazine from 1956 to 1975). The beach is divided between private beach clubs (Club 55, Nikki Beach, Tahiti Plage — sun loungers from €30, lunch from €80) and free public sections. The public sections have the same water. Club 55 (opened in 1955, the day before Bardot arrived) is genuinely worth one long lunch if budget allows: the menu is excellent, the pine-shaded tables extend to the waterline, and it preceded rather than followed the celebrity culture that now defines it.

The 17th-century citadel above the village — a hexagonal fortress with a donjon and ramparts, built 1602–1607, commanding the bay and the peninsula. The walk up takes 10 minutes from the port; the view from the ramparts over the bay, the village rooftops, and across to the Maures mountains behind is the finest elevated view on the western Riviera. At sunset, the light falls on the warm ochre of the village from the west and the Pampelonne peninsula is silhouetted in the south. The Maritime Museum inside (€3 extra) is modest but the ramparts are the point.