Saint-Tropez was a fishing village of roughly 4,000 people until a 1956 film crew arrived to shoot on its beaches. The harbour that now anchors the cannes to st tropez boat tour was rebuilt after 1945, having been shelled during the Allied landings of Provence. Its ochre and rose façades along the Quai Jean Jaurès are reconstructions, faithful to the pre-war line but younger than they appear. The sea route itself is older than the road. Before the corniche was cut into the Massif de l'Estérel, boats carried cork, wine and chestnut wood between the Gulf of Saint-Tropez and the bay of Cannes. The crossing traces a coastline of two geologies: the red porphyry cliffs of the Estérel, quarried since Roman times, giving way to the schist and umbrella pine of the Maures. Passengers on a coastal cruise pass Théoule, Miramar and the Calanques de l'Estérel, then round Cap Camarat, where a lighthouse of 1831 stands 130 metres above the water — among the highest in France. Saint-Tropez matters today for reasons that predate its celebrity. Paul Signac bought a house here in 1892 and painted the port in divided colour; Matisse, Bonnard and Marquet followed, and the Musée de l'Annonciade, installed in a sixteenth-century chapel, holds the result. The Citadelle, a hexagonal donjon begun in 1602, looks down on the whole gulf and now houses a maritime history museum. Below it, the Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption carries a bell tower painted the same rust-orange as the fishermen's boats — the pointu, a lateen-rigged hull once built on this shore. Cannes supplies the other half of the story. Quai Laubeuf, the departure quay at 06400 Cannes, sits at the western end of the Croisette, a short walk from the Palais des Festivals. The port is free to enter; only the sailings are ticketed. From the same water one sees the Îles de Lérins — Sainte-Marguerite, where a masked prisoner was held from 1687, and Saint-Honorat, monastic since the fifth century. Operators running the cannes to st tropez boat tour tour share this quay with the Lérins ferries, so a single morning can hold two very different seascapes. What the Côte d'Azur offers by sea is a reading of its own geography: two towns, one gulf, and eighty kilometres of coastline that the corniche only glimpses.