The inhabitants of Castellar in the Alpes-Maritimes department have long lived from the cultivation of olive trees. Tourism developed from the end of the 19th century there, following the arrival of the railway in Menton in 1869. Castellar, which then had between 700 and 800 inhabitants, saw its population drop following the two world wars to collapse to 297 inhabitants in 1946. The village has since known a constant demographic revival that accelerated at the beginning of the 2000s and allowed it to reach 1,116 inhabitants in 2018.