Exploring le Var

Since our stay in France is drawing to a close, we wanted to visit la Côte d’Azur once more especially because the weather has warmed up. Last Wednesday we took off for the town of Port-Fréjus which, with Fréjus and the neighboring city of Saint-Raphaël, make up a middle-sized metropolitan area which is not as expensive as other cities bordering the Mediterranean. For a while now, we had been wanting to explore the department of le Var and some of its famous resorts and cities.

Thursday morning we took a beautiful ride west along the coast to get to Saint-Tropez. Although the town was swarming with cars and people, reminding us a little of summer in Cape Cod, the population at this time of the year is nowhere close to the 80,000 or so tourists who invade the resort in the month of August alone! A large number of visitors was grouped beside le Vieux Port waiting for an enormous, gray yacht to retract its gangplank and set out to sea. The harbor itself was filled with all kinds of water craft, including some small, traditional fishing boats called les pointus. We circled the port and then followed le sentier du littoral, a coastal footpath right on the water’s edge. It is easy to understand the attraction of Saint-Tropez; it is a very clean, pretty city in a lovely setting with many expensive shops. Lunch was enjoyable, chatting with a Parisian couple about food, wine, and what to see in town. We took their advice and walked by la place des Lices, a vast square bordered by plane trees, where the twice-weekly marché is held. Then we drove up to la chapelle Sainte-Anne, located on top of a hill in a lovely park surrounded by cypress, pine, and oak trees. The chapel, built to thank God for sparing the town from the plague in 1720, offers a fine panorama of le golfe de Saint-Tropez and the neighboring city of Sainte-Maxime.

Sainte-Maxime, by the way, was in the news on May 8th because French president Nicolas Sarkozy celebrated the anniversary of the victory in Europe there this year. Just about everywhere we went along the coast on this trip, in fact, we were reminded of le débarquement de Provence in August 1944 and the sacrifices made by the Allies in World War II. We noticed monuments to the war dead and even what appeared to be an American landing craft in Le Dramont, just outside of Saint-Raphaël.

Our final activity for the day was to drive up to the ancient, fortified village perché of Grimaud. Named after the Grimaldi family which presently rules la principauté de Monaco, the town has beautiful architecture, as well as spectacular views of the countryside and the Mediterranean. We climbed up to the ruins of the eleventh century castle, destroyed in 1655 at the end of les guerres de religion on the orders of le cardinal Mazarin because of the town’s Protestant leanings.