St Tropez Backcountry

Brigitte Bardot changed St. Tropez. When she arrived in the 1950s it was just another beautiful, seaside town on the French Riviera. Life moved slowly, people got by and painters were drawn to the town for the amazing, natural light. Almost overnight that was overshadowed by something new – Brigitte Bardot. The most famous woman on the planet at the time breezed into this sleepy part of the world and it became fashionable. Being thrust into the spotlight was followed by a flow of new money for mansions, nightclubs and private beaches. Unlike many fashions, this one hasn’t faded over the decades and as you drive along the harbour today it’s hard to keep count of the luxury yachts resting there. On one side of the road are the moorings, on the other the bars and cafes that line the seafront - a coffee will set you back nearly five Euros. Europe’s wealthy still flock here to sunbathe, socialise and party...



The high life runs in a thin strip along the coast, from the perfect (and now entirely private) beaches of Pampelonne and out the other side of the town towards Porte de Cogolin. Yet it is just that, a strip. Head more than a kilometre inland, or along the seafront away from the town and you find a different world. You start to meet the people who really live in the area, not just those who stay for a few weeks each summer. Get talking to those locals and you discover that the area is also a giant, outdoor playground, on the water and in the hills and forests. This is the backcountry of the French Riviera.

It was here that mountain biking established its first foothold in France, back in the early 1980s. These days the Roc D’Azur is the biggest mountain bike race in the world, with over 15,000 competitors taking part last year. Before it moved to Frejus in the mid-90s, it began here in 1984, just outside St. Tropez. Only 15 people showed up to that first race and today many of the trails they used are no longer open to riders. Not all is lost though, some of that network still exists. More importantly, with the healthy community of riders who live here all year round, there are new trails. Dozens of them.



Driving through the area with Manou, one of the partners at Peps Spirit, she explains that nearly every hill you see has a trail on it. Winding their way across the whole peninsula are around 300km of unspoilt singletrack. There’s a huge range of terrain too, from rocky costal peninsulas, up to higher, more alpine terrain inland. The people who come here to St Tropez rarely venture out this far, they are more interested in partying or sunbathing than mountain bikes or sea kayaking. That suits Manou just fine - it means they are free to make the most of the land.



We pull the van up at the entrance to a field on the edge of a vineyard and unload the bikes. Looking around there is nothing obvious in sight, no clear trailhead or signposting - but with local knowledge you don’t need that. A couple of metres along the farm track, it’s a sudden left into what looks like nothing more than a thicket of the coarse, spiky bushes that cover the hillsides here. Tucked away behind that outer ring of bushes is thread of perfect, sandy singletrack.

There isn’t much time to get the blood flowing before the climb begins. Still slow from the beautiful but heavy lunch and barely warm with only 100m trail under your tyres, you find yourself struggling to hold traction up a rocky, sandy chute while those bushes claw at your fingers... Manou is certain that this is just a cross country ride, we’re not getting into the all-mountain stuff today. Yet while the rest of the world seems keen to turn cross country into fitness-orientated drag strips, nobody has told the trail builders here.




Climbing is mostly short, but nearly always punishing. There isn’t much vertical on this ridge, so they make up for it by sending you up leg-killing gradients, sometimes on tight, technical singletrack, others on rocky, rutted fireroads. Coming back down you are treated to all-too-short bursts of perfect, thorny singletrack. Diving off from the crest, the first line traverses the side on a loose, off-camber ledge before sending you straight down towards the bottom.

Another fashion that hasn’t reached here is wide bars, riding with 760mm bolted to the front of your bike, you find your hands being constantly whipped and lashed by those bushes as you hurtle through. When it opens out into drainage channels, the rock formations are perfect for working the terrain. You can pick lines, sections to play with and features to jump. Sometimes you’re sliding sideways into a turn and for others gathering the bike in a hurry to avoid deep, wheel-eating ruts.


After three or so hours in this pattern of tough climbs and sweet downs, it’s hard to say how much distance you have covered, or even how many descents you’ve done. What’s more certain is that you have no clue which direction the van is, the thorns have taken quite a lot of skin and there’s a big grin on your face. Not many other cross-country tracks have sketchy hucks into rock gullies and loose moto turns, but the world would be a far better place if they did. Mountain biking is a more accurate way to describe the riding here.




Manou and two friends, Frederique and Seb, started Peps Spirit a couple of years ago to start opening these trails to people. Mixing it up with sea kayaking and paddle boarding they want to show people this backcountry beyond the parties and glitz. Airport transfers from Nice are only an hour and there’s a whole world to play in. With the sheer number of trails around them, they can pick and choose to suit their guests - from chilled cruising around the vineyards, to ugly, man-sized downhill tracks with 1,000m of vertical. What’s more, they are rideable twelve months of the year (although the higher stuff at Val d’Allos isn’t open in winter). For a couple of weeks of the year the temperature might dip down to six or seven degrees centigrade, but other than that, it rarely drops out of double figures. And mud? That’s something that happens in other places...

Throw in the amazing food in the local restaurants and stunning scenery, and you have a near-perfect recipe for a destination. At the moment it may well be the best-kept secret in French mountain biking. With all the work Manou and her partners at Peps Spirit are putting in to open up the area even further, St. Tropez is a name you’ll probably hear again soon enough though. We can’t wait to head back as we know we’ve only just managed to scratch the surface of this incredible area...


www.peps-spirit.fr