In 2026, Esterel Caravaning celebrates its 50th anniversary. To mark this exceptional milestone, I want to open the doors to our memories. Every week, throughout the entire season, I will share our anecdotes, our behind-the-scenes stories, our souvenirs… Fifty stories for fifty years. Here we go!
Aurore Laroche
Once upon a time, there was a lawyer, a scrubland, and… a crazy idea
My father had a passion that very few people knew about: stones. Beautiful ones, large ones, misshapen ones – stones with character. His name was Jean Laroche, a name that was surely predestined. When he and my mother Jacqueline bought these three hills in Agay, in the Estérel massif, in 1974, he didn’t see twelve hectares of scrubland and bare rock. He saw a material to sculpt.
A lawyer by training and an artist at heart, he personally drew up the plans for everything you know today: the roads, the pitches, the buildings, the shower blocks. From the Rastel d’Agay – where he had built a house in 1956 – he envisioned a place unlike any other: a luxury caravan park where space, greenery and Provençal-style buildings would blend in harmony. In 1974, camping still meant tents and spartan holidays. My father, however, was already thinking heated pools and sea-view terraces.
50 years ahead of his time
When he wanted to equip each pitch with its own private sanitary facilities – an unheard-of idea at the time – the authorities wouldn’t go along with it and approved only eighteen. Eighteen out of the 700 authorised pitches! He was furious. Today, a third of our pitches are equipped with them, and it is one of the amenities our guests appreciate the most. My father was simply fifty years ahead of his time.
Believing in their dream, my parents sold their Parisian apartment to fund this colossal project. Three kilometres of sewage pipes to dig, thirty thousand trees to plant, rocks to blast with dynamite, roads to lay out… Together with my mother, they hand-cut the twenty-five thousand old tiles that still cover our buildings today. Every single one. By hand!
The Menhirs of the Estérel
The first holidaymakers who passed through our gates discovered something strange and beautiful: between the pitches, standing like sentinels, large red rocks erected like menhirs. My father had placed them there himself. It was his way of bringing the Estérel massif into the campsite, of reminding visitors that this place had a soul. Those rocks have since been moved. But one remains. Discreet, almost hidden, at the entrance to the patio, beneath the staircase leading to La Plancha. If you walk by, place your hand on it. It is a little piece of my father, still there.
On 14 July 1976, with photographers present and local authorities in attendance, Esterel Caravaning opened its doors with two heated pools, a bar, a restaurant, a snack bar, a tennis court, a television room, and a hair salon! All in all, for that first season: 107 pitches connected to water, electricity and mains drainage (quite rare for the time). The national press hailed it as a revolutionary concept. My father, meanwhile, was already thinking about what came next.
Between us: The boss knows how to operate construction equipment
As a child, this enormous building site was my playground. My father took me everywhere with him – the diggers, the red dust, the roar of the engines. He taught me to drive a Bobcat before almost anything else. To this day, I am perfectly capable of manoeuvring a piece of construction equipment.
It has earned me a few surprised looks over the years.
