The first time I motored into Port Grimaud I genuinely thought I had taken a wrong turn into someone's garden. You leave the open water of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, pass the breakwater, and within a couple of boat lengths you are idling down a canal between pastel houses with their own front-door pontoons. There are bridges overhead, a church on a square, and the occasional resident pottering off to the boulangerie in a small electric launch. It is the closest thing the Mediterranean has to Venice, except a single Alsatian architect dreamt the whole thing up in 1966.
That architect was Francois Spoerry, who bought 30 hectares of mosquito-ridden marsh near Grimaud that nobody else wanted, got planning permission on 14 June 1966, and delivered the first houses in the summer of 1967. He kept building until the early 2000s. What he left behind is 2,400 houses, over 2,000 boat berths, 7 kilometres of canals and 14 kilometres of quay, spread across a dozen man-made peninsulas. Spoerry died in 1999, aged 86, before it was finished, but the place works exactly as he intended: a town where the road outside your house is water.
Getting in
Port Grimaud sits at the head of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, on the north-west shore, a short hop from the famous harbour itself. The approach is straightforward. There is no tidal gate and no bar, because this is the Mediterranean and the sea barely moves. You aim for the entrance, keep an eye out for the steady traffic of day boats and electric taxis, and call the capitainerie on VHF channel 9 before you commit to the canals.
That call matters more here than at most marinas. Port Grimaud is actually three connected marinas (Grimaud I, II and III), with their own basins, and the visitor allocation is spread across them. Grimaud I alone holds around 1,100 berths and keeps roughly 280 for visitors. Tell the harbour office your length, beam and draught, and let them route you. The canals are narrow and the turning room limited, so motoring in to grab any old gap is a quick way to wedge yourself across someone's mooring with an audience.
Depth is the one number to watch. The marina carries up to around 3 metres, and the further you penetrate into the older inner canals the shallower it gets. A deep-keeled boat is fine on the outer berths but should not assume it can reach the prettiest inner quays. If your draught is over 2 metres, say so on the radio.
What a berth costs, and the catch
Port Grimaud is not cheap in July and August, and nor should you expect it to be: you are paying to tie up inside a working postcard, steps from the cafes. The headline summer rate for a 10 to 12 metre boat runs into the same band as the rest of the Saint-Tropez gulf, which is to say dear. The shoulder months of May, June and September are a different proposition, both for price and for the chance of actually finding space. I have rolled in unbooked on a Tuesday in late September and had my pick of fingers.
How the gulf prices its visitors, and which harbours quietly sting you, is something I have laid out in detail in my breakdown of the cote-azur marina fees. Port Grimaud sits at the upper end, but it buys you something genuinely different from a concrete commercial basin.
Med mooring, village edition
Most visitor berths here are stern-to or bow-to, the standard Mediterranean technique, with a lazy line you haul up to hold the boat off the quay. Doing it well in a flat canal with neighbours watching from their terraces is a particular kind of pressure. If you have come down through the canals from the Channel, or across from the Atlantic, and never moored this way, practise somewhere quieter first. I have written a full walk-through of med mooring with lazy lines that covers the crosswind problem, which is the one that catches everyone.
One quirk of Grimaud: some of the residential canals are narrow enough that you reverse a long way to your spot with very little swinging room. Take your time, rig your lines and fenders before you enter the canal, and brief the crew on who is doing what. A calm approach beats a fast one every time in here.
Ashore without leaving the water
The joy of Port Grimaud is that you barely need to step off the pontoon to enjoy it. The village square has cafes, a fish market on summer mornings, and the church of Saint-Francois-d'Assise with a Vasarely stained-glass window and a tower you can climb for the view over the whole lagoon and across to the hilltop old village of Grimaud behind. The little electric bateaux-taxis run between the quarters, which is the right way to get about if your own tender is stowed.
It is also a fine base for the gulf. Saint-Tropez itself is a 20-minute motor across the bay, and arriving there by sea is the only way to skip the queues on the coast road; I have written separately about saint-tropez by sea and why the anchorage is half the appeal. From Grimaud you are also well placed for the beaches of Pampelonne and the quieter water on the southern shore.
Where it fits in a cruise
I treat Port Grimaud as the soft option in the gulf: a night or two of comfort and good dinners between the harder anchoring days further along the coast. If you are stitching together a route, my french riviera sailing guide sets out how the Saint-Tropez gulf links to the rest of the coast, west towards the Esterel and east towards Cannes.
The neighbouring harbour of sainte maxime marina, directly across the gulf on the north shore, makes an easy alternative if Grimaud is full, and it is a more conventional town marina with a beach on the doorstep.
The summer reality
For all its 2,000-plus berths, Port Grimaud fills in high season, and the visitor allocation is a fraction of the whole. Book ahead online if you can, call on the radio the day before, and have a fallback. The gulf has anchoring off the southern beaches when the weather is settled, though the posidonia seagrass rules and crowded summer anchorages mean you cannot drop the hook just anywhere; the wider picture of competing for a french riviera berth august is worth reading before you commit to a peak-season visit.
A typical stop
To give a sense of how I use the place, here is a normal Grimaud night. We come off an anchorage on the southern shore of the gulf in the late afternoon, call the capitainerie on channel 9 from a mile out, and get routed to a visitor finger on the outer canal of Grimaud I. The crew rigs lines and fenders both sides before we enter, because once you are in the canal there is no room to fuss. We reverse in, take the lazy line, and tie up with the church tower in view. Then it is showers, a walk along the quays to the square, a fish dinner at a terrace table over the water, and a nightcap watching the launches putter past. In the morning the boulangerie run is done by dinghy, the water tanks get filled, and we slip out into the open gulf by mid-morning. It is the most relaxed berth in the whole region, and the one the non-sailing half of the crew always asks to go back to.
Practical notes
A few things I have learned the hard way. The bridges over the inner canals are fixed and low, so a sailing boat with a mast stays in the outer basins; do not be tempted to nose under them. The electric launches and day boats have right of way over your sense of urgency, so keep your speed to a crawl and expect to give way. Bring small fenders as well as your usual ones, because the canal quays are close and the finger berths tight. And if you want a quiet night, ask for a berth away from the main square, where the terraces run late in summer. None of this is difficult, but the lagoon rewards a slow, deliberate skipper and punishes a hasty one.
Worth the detour
Plenty of Riviera marinas are functional places you tolerate for a night. Port Grimaud is the rare one that is a destination in its own right, a genuine piece of architecture you sail into rather than walk up to. Bring a boat under 2 metres draught, call ahead on channel 9, mind the narrow canals, and you tie up in the middle of a village that exists purely because one man liked sailing and thought houses should have their own moorings. Even after dozens of visits, the moment you turn off the open gulf into that first quiet canal still makes the crew go quiet.
