Sanary-sur-Mer: Guide, Hotels, Map & Photos
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EUR 34 - 198 Le Vallon du Roy
 Situated in the heart of a pine forest close to the beach, La Marina offers fully equipped apartments. The site features an outdoor swimming pool and … MoreEUR 31 - 174 La Marina
 La Marina is surrounded by a pine forest and boasts direct access via a pedestrianised path to a beach 800 metres away. It offers studios and apartmen… MoreEUR 49 - 170 Grand Hôtel des Bains
 The seafront Grand Hotel des Bains lies in a 3000-m² park and offers cosy and well-appointed accommodation ideally situated on the French Riviera.
R… MoreEUR 117 - 450 Best Western Soleil et Jardin
 This hotel is located 5 minutes from the beach and the port of Sanary-sur-Mer, near Bandol. It offers a relaxation area with jacuzzi and an indoor poo… More | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sanary-sur-Mer: Guide
The département of Var (département)|Var in Provence 13 km from Toulon and 49 km from Marseille, in the south of France.
Overview
The seafront location was part of the commune of Provençal Sanary, which was formalized and distinguished as sur-Mer in 1923.
As a tourist rendez-vous, the village underwent a strong decade of growth in the 1980s.
Sights
Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Pitié: From this chapel built in 1560 on a headland west of the town, the visitor sees a broad view over the bay of Sanary,
Église Saint Nazaire: A Gothic Revival architecture|Gothic Revival church of the late 19th century, Michel Pacha, architect
Tour "romane": In fact a medieval construction.
"Sanary-les-Allemands"
With the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, a great number of German writers and intellectuals left Germany and settled here, where the cost of living was lower than in Paris: the playwright Bertold Brecht, Egon Erwin Kisch, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig. Patronised by Jean Cocteau and his coterie, Sanary had already attracted Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, who attracted other English visitors such as D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, Julian Huxley and his wife Juliette and others. The German expatriates clustered around Thomas Mann and his large family, his brother Heinrich and his wife (the model for Blue Angel), the writers Stefan Zweig and Arnold Zweig, the art critic Julius Meyer-Graefe, the artist René Schickel. The impressionable Sybille von Schoenebeck (later, as Sybille Bedford, the author of A Legacy) lived here with her mother.
"If one lives in exile," wrote Hermann Kesten, "The café becomes at once the family home, the nation, church and parliament, a desert and a place of pilgrimage, cradle of illusions and their cemetery... In exile, the café is the one place where life goes on."
With the declaration of war in 1939 the French government treated these exiles as enemy aliens and interned them in camps: they were seen as no more than so many Germans. After liberation the little village that had been known as "Sanary-les-Allemands" chose to ignore the whole episode, until the 1990s, when the volume of German and Austrian tourists encouraged the unveiling of a small plaque and some signposted tourist itineraries.
External links and references
obituary of Sybille Bedford, February 20, 2006
This "Travel Guide" section is drawn from the Wikipedia article "Sanary-sur-Mer". We hope you will edit and improve it. It is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.