Forget St-Tropez. This is the next Riviera—fueled by petrodollars, post-Communist tycoons, and more than a little of the local rosé. Along the booming coasts of Turkey, Croatia, and Montenegro, Julia Chaplin finds glamour, barefoot chic, and stunning natural beauty. Go now: The yachting set is sailing in

A tanned woman with a party-thin body prances past for the third time in less than an hour in yet another bathing suit. Instead of the Pucci one-piece, this time it's a pink bikini with retro ruffles that recalls 1960s Capri. The noise of blenders whirling up fresh watermelon spiked with vodka competes with the voice of a bald man in dark glasses on his cell phone ("The princess of Kuwait? She's coming here? The Ferragamos, too?"). And ironically, or perhaps not, another note joins the ambient soundscape—the call to prayer begins to waft from loudspeakers affixed to the village mosques nearby.

I'm on a slab of wood pier at the edge of the saturated-blue Aegean Sea—a perch akin to Monopoly's Boardwalk in terms of prime sun-bathing real estate—on the Bodrum peninsula in Turkey, hailed for five years and running as the next St-Tropez. My white terry-cloth lounge cushion and the pier belong to the Maçakizi, a small hotel in the chic resort town of Türkbükü. A system of sails that expand and retract electrically cleverly shades the outdoor bar, where a genetically impressive crowd speaking internationally accented English have gathered, gossiping about the latest mega real-estate deals on the Turkish coast. No one but me seems to notice the paparazzi with telescopic lenses on a little Zodiac just beyond the buoys of the swimming area, who are at this moment being shooed away by hotel security.

"You have Russians, Germans, and Turkish companies with venture capital from the Middle East buying up land here," says Alican Ayanlar, a handsome Boston University graduate from Istanbul who recently moved to Kiev to launch a TV station. He is sipping local rosé with an entourage that flew in to celebrate his wedding. "The energy of the world is here now. Can't you feel it?"

Looking out to sea at the mega-yachts with tinted windows and foreign flags, anchored like so many floating billionaire fortresses, I can indeed. In the last few years, the yachting set (including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich), which coronates vacation spots like fashion editors endorse hot young designers, have begun to show up in peak weeks of summer. Investors from petrol nations such as Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan and the emerging markets of Dubai and Turkey have been jetting around the eastern Mediterranean coast, from Turkey all the way up to Croatia, checkbooks open, hoping to stake out a patch of this commutable frontier. (How the current economic crisis will affect development remains to be seen.) They have been fashioning lavish resorts with Italian marble, padded vodka bars, and cliff-spilling infinity pools, their own Riviera closer to home. Meanwhile, other prospectors have laid claim to a different aesthetic: corners of natural beauty—increasingly rare within reasonable reach of a major airport—that can provide barefoot chic to the luxury fatigued.