Corsica

People see its beaches above all, and they are wrong: Corsica is first a mountain, and its main range crosses it diagonally from north-west to south-east. More than one hundred and twenty summits rise above two thousand metres, the Monte Cinto reaching two thousand seven hundred and six, and that ridge long divided the island into two halves known as the near and the far side of the mountains. The geology follows the same line: granite to the south and west, schist to the north-east, which is why the landscapes change so quickly from one slope to the other. Maquis covers the rest — cistus, myrtle, mastic, strawberry tree, immortelle — over nearly a fifth of the surface, and it is what you smell before you see anything at all. The coast alternates between the two rocks and the two colours. Bonifacio stands on a limestone cliff some sixty metres high, hollowed by the sea and cut by a stairway carved into the face: an unexpected patch of white on an island where granite dominates. Porto-Vecchio opens onto the southern gulfs and onto sands photographed for fifty years, from Palombaggia to Santa Giulia. On the other side, the gulf of Porto gathers the Piana calanques, the Scandola reserve and the village of Girolata, listed together as World Heritage since 1983; the rock there is red porphyry, and it drops straight into clear water. Calvi, further north, looks out over the Balagne and its olive villages, Sant'Antonino, Pigna, Corbara, where baroque churches mark three centuries of Genoese rule. Genoa left far more than churches. Around a hundred round towers, built in the sixteenth century against Barbary raids, still watch the coast at intervals, and one is almost always in sight from a beach. The chestnut trees of the Castagniccia, planted under the same administration, fed whole valleys: chestnut flour is still an everyday product there. Corte, in the centre, was the capital of Pascal Paoli's independent Corsica between 1755 and 1769, with its citadel on a crag and a university founded in 1765 and reopened in 1981. And across the island, polyphony is still sung in three voices, the paghjelle, inscribed in 2009 on Unesco's intangible heritage list. The interior is as worth the detour as the coast, and far less busy. The Restonica gorges climb from Corte towards high lakes; the Niolu, around Calacuccia, is the highest inhabited basin on the island; the Bavella needles raise their granite teeth above the Ospedale forest. The GR 20 crosses all of it from north to south, from Calenzana to Conca, over some one hundred and eighty kilometres and around fifteen demanding stages — this is not a holiday walk, and the refuges must be booked. For those not going that high, the mare a mare paths link the two coasts in a few days and pass through villages where you sleep in people's homes. The table follows the relief: cured pork from the chestnut valleys — coppa, lonzu, figatellu in winter — brocciu made from ewe's or goat's milk depending on the season, honeys that taste wholly different from one valley to the next, and vineyards running from Patrimonio in the north to those of Ajaccio and Figari. Distances remain deceptive: fifty kilometres of mountain road easily take two hours, and it is by accepting that you see the island rather than cover it.