Bandol
Three beaches ranked, an island worth a day, and why not to buy the wine
A small town on the Var coast, and the stretch of it I know best. There are no hotel recommendations below, only what is worth doing once you are there.
Restaurants
- Au Clair de la Vigne: built around wine. Not the best location, but great food at good prices.
- Qeya: brand new and fancy. Great food, good cocktails, and delicious Mediterranean-Lebanese fusion.
- Le Tonnelier: Corsican. Tasty, affordable, and a very welcoming owner.
- Shardana: a very nice Sardinian place. A bit pricey and delicious.
- Sarti: sea-oriented, on the Île des Embiez.
Bars
- Narval: chill and cute, on the town square, and also the only decent coffee in town.
- The Irish pub: a very good bar with great beers and rock music.
Coffee everywhere else in Bandol is uniformly bad, which is worth knowing before you go looking.
Shops
- Saveurs d’Italie: a very good shop for quality Italian products.
- Bakeries: there are plenty of good ones. The one on Rue des Écoles is the best, and the one on the town square is also good, especially for assembling an apéro spread.
Wine
Do not buy Bandol wine as a rule. It is overpriced for what it is, and the name is doing more work than the bottle.
The exception worth trying is a box from Bunan: four bottles from the same estate, each grown on a different slope and soil type. They taste strikingly different from one another, which makes the box genuinely interesting as a tasting exercise even though the wines themselves are not amazing for the price.
Beaches
- Renécros: the cutest, and consequently packed.
- Plage Centrale: the biggest, usually less crowded than Renécros, and generally the default pick.
- Capelan: further from the centre, pebbles rather than sand, and very nice if you do not mind stones.
Islands
- Île des Embiez: worth a full day. Good restaurants, and you can walk the whole island. Take the shuttle from the port.
- Île de Bendor: currently closed for renovation. It was not really worth it before, so wait and see what it becomes.
Day trips
- Cassis: worth it. A few of the calanques are excellent, and some are completely oversaturated.
- Sanary and La Ciotat: both nice.
- Hyères and the presqu’île de Giens: very beautiful, and noticeably further away.
- Porquerolles: a boat day trip, and amazing.
- Saint-Mandrier-sur-Mer: cute, though harder to reach by public transport.
- Toulon: frankly not worth it.
Broadly, most towns along this stretch of coast are pleasant, so the ranking above matters less than it looks.
With kids
- There is an accrobranche, a tree-climbing park, not far from town.
- Hiking, both along the coast and inland.
- Skip the zoo. It is bad.
When to go
Avoid July and August, when it is overcrowded. The best windows are April to May and September to October: still warm, still enough to do, shops and events still running at full schedule, and without the crowds.
Good to know
- The bigger market is on Tuesdays.
- You can sit at Narval and order food from Italia or the market stalls, and the same trick works at the Irish pub with the pizza place next door. Go early for pizza, they run out fast.
