With the classic French Riviera heartland growing increasingly more crowded and overpriced, it’s worth looking further west to the Var coast—past Saint-Tropez, the Var’s perennial poster child, which has since succumbed to the same afflictions—to a stretch of coast where Riviera charm remains blithely intact. Though to understand the Var coast, you must first understand what it is not.
The main hub of the French Riviera, as most people conceive of it, is essentially a narrow strip of the Alpes-Maritimes that includes popular towns like Nice, Cannes and Antibes. It’s compact, gleaming, and easily digested, with Nice’s airport, France’s third busiest, funneling in travelers from all over the world, while the Riviera railway, one of Europe’s great scenic lines, stitches the coast together stop by stop. It is, in short, a machine built for tourism. The Var coast, by contrast, has no such infrastructure. Toulon has an airport, but with fewer international routes and that reliable railway that runs further east, abandons the coastline here, retreating inland.
Much of the Var also remains indifferent to the kind of glitz and glamour the east has perfected. It has no Monaco, a sovereign city-state conjured from pure ambition, where the Grand Prix tears through the streets. It has no Cannes Film Festival, with its fortnight of red carpet theater. Generally, fewer palace hotels. Fewer Michelin stars. Fewer superyachts (outside Saint-Tropez’s summer circus, anyway).
But what the Var does have, in almost embarrassing abundance, is nature—from the Port-Cros National Park, the rust-red ridges of the Estérel, the silence of the Maures massif, the Îles d’Or, shimmering offshore in a sea of improbable blue, and vineyards spilling down to the coast, producing some of France’s most underrated wine. Most of these are protected landscapes, and the tourism figures reflect that restraint. Here, you can soak in Riviera life without the performance, finding a quieter register that feels, somehow, more indulgent.
From a new wave of design-forward hotels, to no-frills seaside villages, wild nature, scenic islands and an art and culture scene that is having a moment, the Var is on the cusp of a moment of its own. It also happens to enjoy slightly warmer and sunnier weather than its eastern neighbors year-round, a function of its more sheltered position and some benevolent local microclimates. A small but persuasive bonus.
Pull up a chair at a port-side terrace in Bandol and order a glass while you wait for the ferry to cross—the harbor town’s small appellation has a disproportionately serious reputation, its Mourvèdre-driven reds unusually structured and age-worthy for the region. Seven minutes by private boat for hotel guests, or public ferry for daytime visitors, lies Zannier Île de Bendor, one of the most anticipated hotel openings in the South of France this summer, which arrived this month after five years of transformation.
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