Corsica (Ajaccio)

Top things to do in Corsica (Ajaccio)

1. 01

   The GR20 - the hardest waymarked trail in Europe

   hiking adventure nature wildlife

   Around a hundred and eighty kilometres from Calenzana in the Balagne to Conca above the south-east coast, sixteen stages and roughly ten thousand metres of climbing, following the watershed the whole way. The reputation is earned and worth stating plainly: this is not a walking holiday but a mountain route, with long days on bare granite, chains and cables on the exposed sections, boulder fields and scrambling where a slip would matter, and staffed refuges that need booking and still leave you carrying food. The northern half, Calenzana to Vizzavona, is much the harder; the southern half is a serious but more forgiving trek. The season is roughly mid-June to the end of September - the passes hold snow into June and the refuges wind down in early October - and the old Cirque de la Solitude stage was abandoned and rerouted after seven walkers were killed there in a storm in 2015. Anyone wanting the scenery without the commitment should look at the Mare a Mare and Mare e Monti routes, which cross the island at gentler altitudes and sleep in villages.

2. 02

   Bonifacio - the old town on the chalk cliffs

   history scenic culture arts 👍 Popular

   The one piece of limestone on a granite island, and it has been undercut by the sea into a leaning white wall with a walled town sitting on top of it, houses hanging out over the drop. The port is hidden in a long narrow inlet below, the haute ville is reached through Genoese gates, and the Escalier du Roi d'Aragon drops a hundred and eighty-seven steps down the cliff face on a slant, with a story about an Aragonese siege in 1420 attached to it that almost certainly is not true. Walk out to the marine cemetery and the Bastion de l'Etendard for the view along the cliffs to the Grain de Sable, and take a boat out of the marina to see the town the way it is meant to be seen, from underneath. Sardinia is a dozen kilometres across the strait and clearly visible.

3. 03

   Scandola and the Gulf of Girolata - the coast with no road

   nature wildlife scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   A nature reserve of red volcanic rock on the west coast, inscribed as a World Heritage site along with the gulf and pinnacles beside it, and reachable only from the water: cliffs, arches and stacks in oxidised reds and blacks, ospreys nesting on the ledges, and shags and dolphins in the bays. Excursion boats run from Porto, Calvi, Cargese and Ajaccio, usually pausing at Girolata, a hamlet of a few dozen people under a Genoese fort that has no road to it at all and is otherwise reached by a two-hour walk over the pass from Bocca a Croce. Sailings are seasonal and the first thing cancelled when the swell gets up, which happens often enough that it is worth putting the trip early in a stay rather than last.

4. 04

   Les Calanche de Piana - red granite above the gulf

   scenic hiking 👍 Popular

   Pillars, towers and wind-hollowed lumps of orange-red granite standing several hundred metres above the sea, with the D81 threading through the middle of them on a ledge barely wide enough for two cars. It is one of the great short drives in the Mediterranean and it is a much better walk: the Chemin des Muletiers loops down the old mule track, and short marked paths run out to the Chateau Fort and the Tete de Chien for the view down onto the gulf. Late afternoon light is the point, and the roadside pull-ins fill by mid-morning in summer.

5. 05

   Palombaggia, Santa Giulia and Rondinara - the southern beaches

   scenic 👍 Popular

   The stretch of coast either side of Porto-Vecchio is what most of France pictures when it pictures Corsica. Palombaggia is a curve of pale sand under umbrella pines with pink granite boulders piled at each end and the Cerbicale islands offshore; Santa Giulia is a near-enclosed bay so shallow and still it works for small children; Rondinara, further south towards Bonifacio, is an almost circular shell of sand reached down a long rough lane. Come early or late in the day in summer, when the parking and the crowd both make more sense, and note that the water in these bays stays cool well into spring even when the air does not.

6. 06

   Corte and the Restonica gorge - the mountain capital

   history hiking scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   The town in the middle of the island, stacked under a citadel with a watchtower called the Nid d'Aigle on the rock above it, was the capital of the independent Corsica of the 1750s and is still where the island keeps its university and its own museum. Behind it the Restonica gorge climbs a narrow single-track road to the shepherds' huts at Grotelle, and from there a rough hour of walking on rock reaches Lac de Melo, with Lac de Capitello another half hour higher, two glacial lakes in a granite cirque that can hold ice into early summer. Access up the valley is controlled in peak season with a shuttle from town and limited parking, and the road is closed by snow in winter. Corte is also the halfway point of the island's railway, so it is one of the few interior places you can reach without a car.

7. 07

   The Lavezzi islands - granite skerries in the strait

   nature wildlife scenic

   A scatter of low granite islets off the southern tip, protected as a reserve, where the rock has weathered into rounded boulder piles and the water between them is shallow and clear enough for the snorkelling to be the main event. Boats run out of Bonifacio through the summer and drop you for a few hours. Two cemeteries on the main island hold the dead of the frigate Semillante, wrecked here in a gale in 1855 with the loss of everyone aboard, which is a sobering thing to walk past between swims. Divers know the same waters for a site where large dusky groupers have been protected long enough to be unbothered by people.

8. 08

   Cap Corse - the D80 round the finger

   scenic off beaten path food

   The forty-kilometre peninsula pointing north from Bastia is the island in miniature and the emptiest driving on it: a loop road with a gentle east side of fishing villages such as Erbalunga and Macinaggio, and a west side that is a genuine cliff road, narrow and unrailed, past Nonza and its black beach - shingle stained by the tailings of an old asbestos mine up the hill - and down to Centuri, a tiny harbour known for its lobster boats. Genoese watchtowers stand on almost every headland, the Moulin Mattei at the top of the ridge is the classic view, and the coastal customs path from Macinaggio to Barcaggio takes half a day on foot past beaches with nothing behind them. Patrimonio at the base of the cape is the island's best-known wine village.

9. 09

   Aiguilles de Bavella - granite needles above the pines

   hiking adventure scenic

   Seven red-grey rock spires standing over a forested pass in the south of the island, with a small statue of the Virgin of the Snows at the col and one of the most photographed skylines in Corsica behind it. The easy version is the marked walk to the Trou de la Bombe, a wind-drilled hole through a rock wall, about two hours there and back; the serious version is the alpine variant of the long-distance trail, which goes over the needles on cabled rock rather than round them. Below, in high summer, the Purcaraccia and Vacca canyons are the island's best-known canyoning, granite slides and pools done with a guide when the water is low.

10. 10

    Maison Bonaparte and Palais Fesch, Ajaccio - Napoleon's town

    history culture arts

    The house where Napoleon was born in August 1769, a year after the island became French, is preserved as a museum a few streets back from the old port, along with the cathedral where he was baptised and a fair amount of statuary insisting on the connection. The better museum is up the street: the Palais Fesch, built around the collection of Napoleon's uncle the cardinal, holds one of the largest gatherings of Italian painting in France outside the Louvre, with a strong run of early Italian panels that would draw a queue anywhere else. Ajaccio is also where to eat well before heading into the mountains, and the Route des Sanguinaires runs west out of town to the red islets at the mouth of the gulf, which is the standard place to watch the sun go down.

11. 11

    Bastia's old port and Terra Vecchia - the Genoese half of the island

    history culture arts scenic

    The island's second city is a working port that never bothered to prettify itself, and it is much the better for it: a horseshoe harbour of tall, faded, shuttered houses, the twin bell towers of Saint-Jean-Baptiste standing over the boats, baroque oratories with painted ceilings tucked into lanes off the fish market, and one of the largest public squares in France running along the seafront. Above it the Terra Nova citadel holds the governors' palace and the city museum. Ten minutes south, out among the vines on the flat, the Pisan church of La Canonica is the finest Romanesque building on the island, banded in green and cream stone and standing entirely alone.

12. 12

    The Chemins de fer de la Corse - the micheline over the spine

    scenic off beaten path

    A metre-gauge railway that crosses the island's mountains rather than going round them, running from Ajaccio to Bastia in about four hours by way of Bocognano, the Vizzavona tunnel, Corte and Ponte Leccia, with a viaduct over the Vecchio river built by the Eiffel works. Locals call the trains the trinighellu, roughly the little trembler. A branch runs from Ponte Leccia through Ile-Rousse to Calvi, and along the Balagne coast in summer it works as a beach tram, stopping on request at halts with nothing but sand behind them. It is the only way to reach the interior without a car, and the ride is the reason to do it rather than the timetable.

13. 13

    Charcuterie, brocciu and chestnut flour - the mountain table

    food culture arts

    Corsican cooking comes down from the hills, not in from the sea. Pigs raised loose on chestnuts and acorns become prisuttu ham, coppa, lonzu and the smoky liver sausage figatellu, which is a winter thing and should be treated with suspicion in August. Brocciu, a fresh cheese made from reheated ewe or goat whey, is the other pillar and is also seasonal, roughly from late autumn into early summer, turning up in omelettes with mint, stuffed into vegetables and baked into fiadone. The Castagniccia in the north-east is a chestnut forest the size of a county, and its flour goes into polenta, fritters and cakes. Drink Patrimonio or Ajaccio wine from nielluccio, sciaccarellu and vermentinu, chestnut beer, and the quinine-and-muscat aperitif made on Cap Corse.

14. 14

    Filitosa and the Cauria menhirs - the carved stones of the south-west

    history off beaten path

    Filitosa is a Bronze Age site on a low spur above a stream where the standing stones have faces, and some of them have swords and daggers carved on them too, which is close to unique in the Mediterranean. They were found under scrub by a farmer and excavated from the 1940s, and the site is small, shaded by olives and quietly extraordinary. Further south on the Sartenais plateau, the alignments at Cauria and the long rows at Palaggiu are rougher and emptier, standing in the maquis with nobody around. Sartene itself, dark granite and steep, was called the most Corsican of Corsican towns by a nineteenth-century French inspector of monuments and has not tried to shake the description off.

15. 15

    The Desert des Agriates - Saleccia and Lotu

    scenic off beaten path nature wildlife

    A block of uninhabited maquis and rock between Saint-Florent and the mouth of the Ostriconi, misnamed a desert and once the granary of the north, holding two of the best beaches in the country at the end of it. Saleccia is a long white strand backed by umbrella pines with nothing built on it; Lotu is smaller and shallower a headland away, and the coastal path between them takes about an hour. Getting there is the filter: a boat shuttle from Saint-Florent, a long rough track from Casta that will punish an ordinary hire car and is not covered by the insurance on it, or a walk in on the customs path.

16. 16

    Calvi citadel and the Balagne villages

    history scenic culture arts

    Calvi's Genoese citadel stands on a rock at the end of a long pine-backed beach, with a claim to be Columbus's birthplace that the town displays on a plaque and historians decline to endorse, and the tale of Nelson losing the sight of an eye at the siege here in 1794, which is true. Inland, the Balagne is a shelf of olive groves and hill villages: Sant'Antonino on its cone of rock is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on the island, Pigna is given over to instrument makers and singers, Corbara looks down on the whole coast, and the polychrome Pisan church at Aregno sits in the middle of the vines. It is a half-day loop on hairpin roads and the best introduction to the interior for anyone not ready for the mountains.

Getting to & around Corsica (Ajaccio)

Know before you go