Grimaud

Grimaud grew from the castrum of Grimaldo, named after a landowner, which appears in the charters of the abbey of Saint-Victor of Marseille from the eleventh century, on a rocky peak overlooking the gulf and watching over this part of the Maures. The story of a Gibelin de Grimaldi rewarded with the land for fighting the Saracens rests on a charter that historians showed in the eighteenth century to be a forgery.

In the fourteenth century the village drew together behind its rampart on the hilltop. The castle, the centre of the lordship of Le Freinet, was enlarged in the seventeenth century and dismantled after the Revolution. Windmills and watermills ground flour and pressed olives; in the nineteenth century cork-making, vines and silk took over.