Saint-Tropez to Monaco, the long way

In August the coast road between Saint-Tropez and Monaco carries half of Europe, slowly. The same journey by water is around fifty nautical miles, taken at whatever hour suits you, with the red rock of the Esterel to port and nothing between you and lunch but a decision about where to anchor. The Riviera invented the modern charter holiday, and a century on it is still the coastline where the whole apparatus of yachting works exactly as it should.

The original charter coast

Distances here are short and the season is long. Saint-Tropez to Cannes is a morning, Cannes to Monaco an easy afternoon, so a week never feels like a delivery trip and no plan is ever final. The berthing infrastructure runs deeper than anywhere else in the Mediterranean, from Port Hercule in Monaco to the Vieux Port at Cannes and the big-yacht quays of Port Vauban in Antibes. What makes the Riviera unusual is that the calendar matters as much as the geography. The Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix arrive within days of each other in May, and Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez closes the season at the end of September. Berths for any of them are settled months ahead, which is a conversation to have early when you plan a charter.

The bays that matter

The famous anchorages earn their reputations, on the right schedule. The Baie de Pampelonne is thick with tenders by eleven and entirely yours at eight. Off Cannes lie the Iles de Lerins, where Fort Royal on Sainte-Marguerite once held the Man in the Iron Mask and the monks of Saint-Honorat still make wine between services. Villefranche-sur-Mer is one of the deepest natural bays in the Mediterranean, calm in most weather, with the ochre town stacked behind the quay and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat ten minutes away, where Paloma Beach faces the evening light. West of Cannes the Esterel drops red porphyry cliffs straight into deep blue water around Agay and Theoule-sur-Mer, and remarkably few yachts stop.

The trick with the famous bays is not avoiding them. It is arriving three hours before everyone else, and leaving the moment they arrive.

Ashore

No coastline in the world packs this much art into so few kilometres. Picasso spent the autumn of 1946 painting in the Chateau Grimaldi above the ramparts of Antibes, and the castle is now his museum. The Fondation Maeght sits in the pines above Saint-Paul-de-Vence with its Giacometti courtyard and Miro labyrinth. Cocteau painted the fishermen's chapel on the quay at Villefranche, Matisse designed the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, and in Monaco the Oceanographic Museum, run for three decades by Jacques Cousteau, hangs off the cliff of Monaco-Ville above your berth. None of it takes more than an hour, which is the correct length of time to be away from a yacht.

The table

Lunch is the organising principle of the Riviera day. Club 55 on Pampelonne began in 1955 feeding the film crew of And God Created Woman and has been feeding everyone since. La Guerite on Sainte-Marguerite is the reason the island's anchorage fills by noon. At the Colombe d'Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence you eat beneath Picassos and Legers that the owners accepted in payment for meals when the painters were poor. In Nice, eat socca, a chickpea pancake blistered in a wood oven and eaten hot with black pepper in the old town, and pissaladiere heavy with slow-cooked onion. At the other end of the register, Alain Ducasse's Louis XV at the Hotel de Paris in Monte-Carlo has held three Michelin stars for most of your lifetime, and a summer table books out well ahead.

When to come

The season runs from May to early October. May is spectacle, with the film festival and the Grand Prix compressing the world's attention into a fortnight and berth prices to match. June and September are the connoisseur's months, warm sea, long evenings and room to anchor. July and August are full, which for some people is precisely the point, and the coast absorbs the crowd far better afloat than ashore. Late September brings Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez and a gulf full of classic sloops, and the water stays swimmable into October, when the Riviera quietly returns to the locals who have been lending it out all summer.