Leaving L’Eperviere on the Sunday we drove due south down the motorway, through Lyon ( because it was a weekend) and down to Estoril Caravaning in around 7 hours including stops and we covered a distance of 331 miles.
Esterel Caravaning is a large site situated in the heart of the Esterel mountains in Valescure which is a district of Saint-Raphael. It is 3kms from the lovely village of Agay with its sandy beaches, about 30kms from Cannes and Saint-Tropez and about 60kms from Monaco and Monte-Carlo. The nearest beach is at Agay about 40 minutes by foot, much quicker by bike, and you simply go left at the site entrance and follow the road, there is a footpath all the way or of course you could drive down although we didn’t see any good motorhome parking. Agay is a very nice small town with a number of bars/restaurants/shops and a large sandy beach that is also manned by a lifegaurd patrol.
The site itself has everything you could want from a campsite and you could manage a weeks stay without venturing far at all if that’s what you wanted to do. There is an excellent pool complex, tennis and squash courts, children’s play area and entertainments and for relaxation there is a bar, restaurant, take away and a well stocked shop. You can hire bikes, rackets etc and the very friendly and helpful staff will also book excursions for you. Walking around the site is interesting and from the perimeter fence you can see wild boars as dusk approaches. These boars will eat bread and a number of people were feeding them although this is not recommended by the site.
On our stay we had one of the self contained pitches and this consisted of a brick building that had private toilet, shower and wash basin and this was a real boon – see picture above. It was certainly very handy not having to queue and being able to leave your toiletries out for the week. We’ve had one of those previously at Port Grimaud near St. Tropez and we’ll keep an eye out for more on our travels.
The beauty about coming down to Provence is of course the guaranteed weather and the week in Aug/Sept we were there it lived up to it’s reputation. The sky was a gorgeous shade of blue all day and the sun shone from 8am to 8pm.
While we were there we went on a day trip to Monaco which is somewhere we’ve always wanted to go and I’ll talk about that on another post.
The site is highly recommended and will suit couples or families, the drive to the site from the motorway is easy and the surrounding area is very attractive and green – lots of golf courses . There are also a couple of large supermarkets just outside of Saint Raphael if you feel the need. We were sorry to leave after our week there although our next stop was Carcassonne and we were looking forward to that very much.
