Forget Saint-Tropez—Here’s Why You Should Explore This Corner of the French Riviera Instead

Reported by Vogue.

The French Riviera has a reputation problem. Nice, Cannes, Antibes — the classic stretch is efficient, beautiful, and completely exhausted by its own mythology. Crowds, prices, and a particular kind of performative luxury have made the whole enterprise feel more like a theme park than an escape. According to Vogue, the antidote is due west: the Var coast, a longer, wilder, less-legible slice of the Mediterranean that hasn't bothered to optimize itself for tourism — and is better for it.

The Var lacks the infrastructure of the east deliberately. No Monaco. No Cannes Film Festival. Fewer palace hotels, fewer Michelin stars, fewer superyachts clogging the horizon (Saint-Tropez notwithstanding). What it has instead is embarrassing amounts of nature: the rust-red Estérel ridges, the Port-Cros National Park, the pine-covered Maures massif, and the Îles d'Or floating offshore in water so blue it reads as digital. Most of it is protected landscape. Tourism numbers reflect that restraint. You can actually think here.

The Itinerary Worth Building

Start in Bandol — order a glass of the local Mourvèdre-driven red, which has a disproportionately serious reputation for a port-side terrace pour — and catch the ferry to Zannier Île de Bendor, the summer's most anticipated hotel opening. The 17-acre, car-free island was once the private Mediterranean playground of pastis magnate Paul Ricard, who bought it in the 1950s and turned it into an arts-soaked idyll. After five years of transformation, it's now a 93-room hotel spread across three village-style clusters — book Delos — with restaurants, two pools, cliff swimming, and artisan ateliers. Further east, Hyères rewards the architecturally curious: Belle Époque and Italianate villas climb its hillsides, and the Villa Noailles — where Man Ray and the Dadaists once gathered — still runs a prestigious annual fashion and photography festival. Then there's the Giens Peninsula, where the Sentier du Littoral coastal path threads between rocky coves and pine cliffs inside the national park, and where the recently refreshed Hôtel Le Provençal — a third-generation family property with a clifftop seawater pool that looks straight out of a Slim Aarons photograph — awaits. Paris-based designer Rodolphe Parente collaborated with owners Benjamin and Damien Piffet on the update; it's exactly as good as it sounds.

The destination that earns its own sentence is Porquerolles, the most beautiful of the Îles d'Or. A 15-minute ferry from Port de la Tour Fondue drops you into a village square shaded by eucalyptus trees. Rent a bike and disappear into three-quarters of an island that has been national park since 1971 — pine and eucalyptus, two working wine estates producing Côtes de Provence rosés, and a conservatory orchard running 700 varieties of Mediterranean fruit. Spend the nights at Le Porquerollais, a six-room restaurant-with-rooms run by an owner whose ex-husband fishes the surrounding waters daily, delivering lobster, sea bream, and red mullet directly to your table. It is, in the best possible way, nothing like a hotel.

The Var doesn't perform Riviera life — it just lives it, and that's the whole point.

Read the original at Vogue.