Day Trips from Toulon: Islands, Calanques & Villages
Escapes
The best day trips from Toulon — the Golden Islands, the calanques, and Provence's hilltop villages, all within an easy drive or short ferry.
All within ~1h of Villa Mauricette
Porquerolles & the Golden Islands
The calanques of Cassis & Port d'Alon
Hilltop villages of the Haut Var
Gassin & the Gulf of Saint-Tropez
Boat trips & sea-cave kayaking
The pleasure of basing yourself near Toulon is how much sits within an easy reach of it. Point the car inland and you're among perched stone villages; aim for the coast and there are islands, calanques and sea caves. None of it is more than an hour away, which means you can be swimming off a boat by ten and sipping rosé in a hilltop square by six.
A few of the days we'd never skip.
Out to the islands
The Golden Islands are the showpiece. Spend a full day on Porquerolles — car-free, all bikes and pine forest and impossible blue — or take a boat around Grand Ribaud and walk the coastal paths of the Giens peninsula. For something more active, kayak the sea caves and cliffs at Pointe Sainte-Marguerite.
Into the calanques
West of Toulon the coast breaks into the calanques — narrow fjord-like inlets of white rock and green water. The Calanque de Port d'Alon near Bandol is the easy, beautiful introduction; push on to Cassis for the famous ones and a swim beneath the cliffs.
The perched villages of the Haut Var
Turn your back on the sea for a day and Provence shows its other face. Cotignac, with its cliff-face houses and shaded square; Tourtour, the "village in the sky"; and the waterfall village of Sillans-la-Cascade are an unhurried trio for a slow, lunch-led day inland.
Towards Saint-Tropez
You can have the Gulf of Saint-Tropez without the marina crush. Gassin and Grimaud look down over the bay from their ramparts — the views, the stone, the rosé, and a fraction of the crowds.
Mauricette's Tip
Don't pair the islands with the back-country on the same day — the joy is in not rushing. Give the coast its mornings, when the light is soft and the coves are empty, and save the villages for late afternoon, when the heat lifts and the squares fill for the apéritif. The drives are short; treating them as a checklist is the one way to spoil them.
Base yourself at the villa
Every one of these starts and ends at Villa Mauricette, sea on one side and hills on the other. See the full picture in our guide to things to do around Toulon, and book the house direct.
