Place des Lices
On Tuesday and Saturday mornings, Place des Lices fills with stalls selling strawberries, lavender, and handmade pottery — but the square's real rhythm belongs to the afternoons, when forty or more pétanque players spread across the gravel and the sound of steel on steel carries across the plane-tree shade. The trees themselves were planted in the early 1800s and now grow wide enough to cover most of the square.
An 18th-century fountain anchors one end. Café terraces hold the perimeter. This is where Saint-Tropez goes about its ordinary life, and it has been doing so for well over two centuries.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to pick a café chair facing the pétanque ground rather than the street — you get the better view. La Baraque Bleu, open nearly 20 hours a day, is the late-night fallback when everything else has closed. Market days start early; by midday the best produce is gone.
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Book directly at the providerHow Place des Lices came to be
The name comes from the medieval French word for jousting ground, and the field was likely used as such as far back as the 9th or 10th century. By the early 1800s, twelve plane trees were planted and the space was formalised as a public square — also known as Place Carnot — marking the shift from a functional field to a civic gathering place.
Between 1890 and 1940, the square drew a steady stream of French artists. Henri Matisse painted it in 1904, the year before Fauvism broke publicly at the Salon d'Automne. Le Café des Arts has operated here since 1891. The pétanque players who gather every afternoon are a continuation of that same long habit of people finding reasons to stay.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summer days run warm — highs between 23 and 27°C, occasionally touching 30°C — with long sunshine hours and almost no rain in July, making the shaded square a reliable refuge. September softens things considerably; October brings the most rain, sometimes heavily, so a morning market visit can turn wet fast.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.