Description & Facts: St. Raphael is in the French Riviera. Next to Fr??jus. This city is spread along the coast and divided in sub-city as Theoule, Agay, Boulouris, Valescure, etc. Train and bus station are in the middle of the city. Whereas the "St Raphael/ Frejus" highway exit is quite far (around 15km) inside the land. Immediately to the west of Saint-Rapha??l lies another, older, town called Fr??jus, and together they form an urban agglomeration known as Fr??jus Saint-Rapha??l. The Var lies in the region called Provence-Alpes-C??te d'Azur, often abbreviated to PACA. In the second half of the nineteenth century the township came under the influence of mayor Felix Martin and writer Alphonse Karr, and owing to their efforts and the beneficial climate the commune developed into a seaside resort popular with artists, sportsmen and politicians. It is the headquarters of the Fr??jus Saint-Rapha??l canton, which is the economic and cultural center of eastern Var and lies in the arrondisement of Draguignan. Its inhabitants are called Rapha??lois in French generally, or Rafelencs in Proven??al Occitan. Saint-Rapha??l is located at the extreme eastern end of the Var, along the border with the adjacent d??partement of Alpes-Maritimes, which occupies the far south-eastern corner of France at the frontier with Italy. The commune has a total of thirty-six kilometres of Mediterranean coastline, owing mainly to the many coves and creeks formed between the natural region of the Esterel Massif and the sea. This places it second only to Marseilles, with fifty-seven kilometres of coastline. The commune is 89.59 km2 in extent. It is almost completely urbanised in the west, but includes over 60 km2 of protected areas of natural forest and the Esterel mountains. Saint-Rapha??l has four large sandy beaches: one near the city centre, called the Veillat; one at Boulouris; one at Le Dramont, and the fourth at Agay. There are two smaller ones at Anth??or et Le Trayas. In 1799 Napoleon Buonaparte and his forces arrived by ship from Egypt, prior to his coup d'??tat in Paris, and landed at a fishing village that was the commune of Saint-Rapha??l. The coastal double-track rail link between Saint-Rapha??l and Nice passes over a substantial viaduct constructed right on the shoreline at Anth??or. These tracks were of strategic importance to the Axis forces during World War II for supplying mat??riel to units in France. There were three separate air raids made on this viaduct from England, between September 1943 and February 1944, involving a total of thirty-one Lancaster bombers operating some seven hundred miles from base. Aircraft of the second raid flew on to Rabat, and from the third raid on to Sardinia. One Lancaster from the first raid was lost, and a flight lieutenant bomb aimer on the third raid was killed by enemy fire, some of which came from ships at sea. All the raids failed in their objective and the rail link was not severed. During World War II, on August 15, 1944, it was one of the sites of a beach landing in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France.