Travel Notes. Part 50: In Quest of Gendarmes from Saint-Tropez

Yuri Loginov’s travel notes accompanied by photographs and video fragments made here and there once upon a time with amazing background classic music to remember forever. Travel Notes. Part 50: In Quest of Gendarmes from Saint-Tropez. I happened to visit the #CotedAzur in the south of #France. The previous trip to France took place a long time ago, back in 2003. But this trip was the first to the Mediterranean coast. Despite the middle of autumn, it was still quite warm and sunny here. By the way, the Cote d’Azur has about 300 sunny days a year. It got its name in 1870 thanks to the novel of the same name by the poet and writer Stéphane Liéjard, inspired by the amazing colour of the water in the sea shining under the sun’s rays. This coast, aka the French Riviera, stretches for 300 kilometres from Toulon to the border with Italy along a coastline rugged by bays with hills that descend to sandy beaches with luxurious resorts (Nice, Cannes, Saint-Tropez, Antibes, Saint-Raphael, Principality of Monaco), equipped with parks, luxurious villas immersed in greenery, yachts, gourmet restaurants, expensive boutiques and exclusive nightclubs. In between the hotels, mountains covered with forests of plane trees, palms, cypresses and chestnuts approach to the water itself. Several kilometres inland and the towns, located on the hills, seem to float above the sea. Thanks to the mild climate and warm Mediterranean Sea, this strip of land, protected from the north and east by the Alps, reaching an altitude of over three thousand meters above sea level, is considered one of the world’s best vacation spots, including in Russia: the most popular place for Russians was Nice, although in Western Europe Monaco and #SaintTropez are considered the most prestigious. Saint-Tropez is a very small, but surprisingly pleasant and almost unchanged town over the past 50-60 years. The first settlement here was founded in the 2nd century BC. The city received its modern name in honour of the Christian Saint Trophimus, who was beheaded under the emperor Nero (54-68 AD). Until the 1950s, it was little known to the general public, but received popularity in 1956, when the film “And God Created Woman“ with Brigitte Bardot was filmed here, and later thanks to the film “Pool“ with Alain Delon, and comedy films about “Gendarmes from Saint-Tropez“ with Louis de Funes and Michel Galabru in the lead roles. Watch the previous video about France on The original photos are laid out on @yuri-loginov-107391.