It’s probably the world’s only fishing village where it’s easier to buy a €25,000 “mini” Celine handbag, a €4,000 Christian Dior trench or a €2,000 Rimowa suitcase than it is to pick up a rod and tackle.
Ever since Brigitte Bardot started cavorting on its beaches in the 1950s, Saint-Tropez has been better known as a place to catch a glimpse of a celebrity than a fresh sea bass. But now longsuffering locals are warning that the annual influx of the global super-rich is becoming too much – even for them.
“Independent restaurants, hotels and cafes are all being bought by luxury groups,” says Vérane Guérin, a municipal councillor. “It’s becoming not Saint-Tropez, but LVMH Ville.”
LVMH, the luxury goods company founded and run by Europe’s richest person, Bernard Arnault, owns the town’s Celine, Dior and Rimowa stores as well outlets for several of its other brands, including Fendi and Loewe.
The conglomerate, whose official name is LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, also owns two of the town’s fanciest hotels: the Cheval Blanc and the White 1921.
There are LVMH restaurants serving its Moët & Chandon champagne, a Dior cafe, and even “LV by the Pool” – a beach club with branded sun loungers and parasols.
Guérin, who unsuccessfully stood as an independent to become the mayor of Saint-Tropez at the last election, said that if she had won the vote she would have done more to prevent the super-rich “takeover” of the town. “The feel of Saint-Tropez is changing so rapidly; no more is it for artists and artisans,” she says.
The number of super-rich people – including Arnault, the world’s second-wealthiest person after Elon Musk – descending on the Côte d‘Azur resort has sent property prices soaring, forcing many local people to move away permanently.
“People who have been here for generations are having to move miles inland, and drive back to work. The houses, the flats, the apartments – it has all been taken,” says Guerin. “These are people who lived here all year round, while the rich people only come for weeks in the summer. In the winter there are so few people that it is hard for the grocery shops to keep going.”
A recent surge in big names with big money buying homes or holidaying with wealthy friends – Drake, Uma Thurman, Diplo and Zac Efron were all spotted partying there this summer – has led to such a rapid change of demographics of the town of just over 4,000 people that academics say that “before long there will be nothing but billionaires”.
“There have always been rich people here,” says Géraldine, who works in a Saint-Tropez public library, tucked away near the Dior cafe that charges €12 (£10.30) for an ice tea and the White 1921 hotel, where rooms start at €600 a night. “But now there are so many of them, and everything is so ‘luxe’ it makes you want to throw up.
“Brigitte Bardot and the other film stars that followed her were still part of the community, and they would play pétanque on Place des Lices [the central square],” Géraldine says. “But now, the billionaires, they don’t interact with us, they just want to show off to their friends and stay in their bunkers on ‘Les Parcs’ or on their superyachts. They don’t want to be real Tropéziennes.”
Les Parcs de Saint Tropez is a gated community on a hill overlooking the old town from the east so as to provide picture perfect sunsets. Homeowners include Arnault, as well as another billionaire, Vincent Bolloré, who owns a third of the media group Vivendi among a vast portfolio of assets, François-Henri Pinault, the founder of Kering, the luxury company that owns Gucci, Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta, Francis Holder, who owns most of the macaron brand Ladurée as well as the Paul bakery chain, and the late Mohamed Al Fayed.
When a Guardian reporter attempted to cycle up Chemin de la Fontaine-du-Pin, they were met by three security guards about 50 metres before reaching the gatehouse that bars the way to the community. The almost 100 security cameras that monitor the estate had apparently alerted them to a “suspicious presence”.
Property prices there are some of the highest in the world, according to the estate agents Knight Frank and Sotheby’s. While the estate has always been expensive, the average price of its almost 200 homes has risen from about €5m a decade ago to more than €13m today, though they rarely change hands.
A water’s-edge villa called Octopussy, after the 1983 Bond film, was recently advertised for offers in excess of €40m. The nine-bedroom house – which can be accessed by boat or helicopter – is now available to rent for €71,400 a night.
“The prices are frankly ridiculous,” says Guérin. “They’re now so high that even people we would have previously considered to be rich can’t buy in the best locations. The world’s 0.1% have bought everything, and it’s pushed up prices of everything.”
Henley & Partners, a London-based firm that advises the super-rich on buying residence and citizenship abroad while spending large chunks of their lives in the UK, Europe and America, recently singled out Saint-Tropez as a world hotspot for the super-rich to buy property but not live.
Its research found that more than 100 people who each had more than $100m in disposable income visited second homes in Saint-Tropez last year, but only 11 of them lived there all year.
Some of the restaurants in Saint-Tropez have been accused of reserving space only for those that they expect – from a database of previous visits – to be big spenders and big tippers. A hospitality worker told the Nice-Matin newspaper: “It’s basically: are you likely to splash the cash, or are you small fry?”
The mayor, Sylvie Siri, who declined to speak to the Guardian, told the Nice-Matin that the “despicable practices” were “extremely shocking to me because they are unfortunately true”.
“These practices are odious for the resort, and therefore for our clientele, but also for local people. We have already been chased out of our flats, and pretty soon we’ll be chased out of our restaurants too, unable to eat out.”
