You know that feeling you get when you do a wardrobe clear out and you find an old pair of jeans that you don’t even remember buying, or wearing, or wanting, but they look cool, and you try them on and somehow they fit perfectly — well, that my friends, is Corsica. Corsica stands for every clichéd proverb, idiom, and mangled proverb of unearthed, uncut treasure under the sun: the sapphire in the rough, the un-veiled goddess — the forgotten Euro in the super-market trolley.
If you’d asked me what I knew about Corsica before I visited, I’d have struggled to list more than a few, feeble facts about this Mediterranean idyll. Other than, of course, its most famous export: that man born here a few hundred years ago; you know, the one who suffered from the worst case of small man syndrome in History.
But why we don’t know more? Well, in the UK, Corsica exists as a somewhat nebulous place — a place we know the name of, but not much else, like Wuhan, Donetsk, and Huddersfield. As the least well known of the five largest Mediterranean islands, it does not glisten in our collective consciousness quite like Sicily, spiritual home of the mafia, nor Crete, mythological home of the Minotaur and... Malia. Nor does it have Cyprus’ close historical ties, or Sardinia’s burgeoning tourist market.
So where had the inclination to travel to Corsica come from? Via word-of-mouth; my wife’s cousins to be exact. They’d visited Corsica last year. They’d gushed endlessly about the inexpressible beaches, the indescribable beaches, the inexhaustible beaches. The best beaches in Europe. They’d told us how wonderfully temperate the climate is in May. A perfect love affair between rugged Italian countryside and French wine and cuisine. They asked my wife’s family if we would join them.
They had us at bonjour.
What they hadn’t warned us about, what they’d failed to declare in their blazing testimonies, was the travel. Ahh, yes, accessibility to Corsica from the UK can be a major b-e-a-c-h. Phew! I’m glad I’ve got that out the way. The number of direct flights running from London to Corsica is irreducibly small. It’s one of those subtle, unconscious, algorithm-driven reasons why so few Brits consider this French province as their first choice of destination. EasyJet runs two per week, on a Saturday and Tuesday, as does British Airways. But that’s about it. As such, the cost of flying can be exorbitant. Especially during those pesky school holiday. Scour the internet far enough in advance and you’ll find a deal — they do exist — but otherwise you’ll have to do what we did: go via Paris.
‘Paris! Ahh, the torture, the strain,’ I hear you say. In fact, if you can reconcile yourself to the additional journey time, the admin of a two-leg journey — 1. Eurostar 2. Flight — it’s a perfectly pleasant, perfectly affordable means of travel. As the flight is domestic, you can opt to coordinate your Eurostar and flight on the same day. Or how about an early evening Eurostar the on Friday, a late-night plate of garlic-drowned snails on the Champs-Élysées, rounded off by a mellow mid-morning flight on Saturday, like we did? Sound good?
Here’s a quick fact about me. I'm terrified of flying — specifically the taking off, being in a tin can at 10,000 ft, and landing parts. That means I don’t get much time to enjoy the bird’s-eye views of the country before I black out. I avoid window seats like the plague. On this occasion, however, as we neared the landing bit, the plane enacted an aggressive banking manoeuvre, forcing me, like a semi-inverted B52-bomber, to make unwanted eye-contact with the port-side window. What I saw... bedazzled me. I couldn’t quite compute the sight that stretched out beneath me: an infinite, celestial domain of blue iridescence, a rippling mass of glistening blue gemstones — zircon, opal, aventurine, and lapis. ‘Is this heaven?’ I wondered in an upside-down hanging daze, ‘or the sea?’ But the Mediterranean Sea doesn’t look like this; does it?
Then the plane righted and the full ragged spine of Corsica’s carnally green, rock-rugged mountain range panned into view. ‘Wow, I’ve seen this shot before,’ I remember thinking — in the opening credits of Jurassic Park. I half expected to see a Tetradactyl burst from the cloud cover. In fact, they didn’t film any of those films here. But they should have done, because there’s something about Corsica, something about its terrain that sets it wholly apart from its European neighbours. Something that’s hard to fathom.
That was my first impression upon landing — not quite fathomable. All around me, the mountains, the sea, the sky, the palms and the poplars, were suffused with a brilliant but tinted light. A distinct, dusty, dusky grain that made me think I’d walked into one of my parent’s old photo collages in the downstairs loo.
You’ll find Bastia, the airport we flew into, close to the north-easternmost point — or the aorta — of the heart-shaped island; while Lecci (Porto Vecchio), where we’d booked our Airbnb, is closer to the south-easternmost tip. Most, if not all, of the island’s most popular tourist spots: Ajaccio, Bonifacio, Calvi, and Porto Vecchio are consigned to the coast. You know what that means — yep, crawling at thirty mph, behind a clapped-out Renault Clio, anxiously anticipating your next overtaking window, on Corsica’s only single-track dusty, bendy, bumpy, bottom-clenching road. That is, until you turn off onto the backroads and discover that everyone drives three times as fast. How does that work? But still, why worry? Wind down your windows, cue Louis Armstrong’s ‘We Have All the Time in the World’ and pretend you’re at the helm of an Aston Martin DBS convertible; and forget what you’re really driving — a sardine-stuffed Fiat Punto.
Porto Vecchio is something of a contradiction. It’s bouji but also a little rough round the edges; French but also not French; a youngish town but also one that enjoys an ancient and polymorphic history. How does that figure? Various civilisations — Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Genoese, and French — have at one time or another exploited the area's natural port advantages to establish a geo-strategic trading post. Unfortunately for the Corsicans, the harvesting of cork oak and salt — Porto Vecchio literally translates to ‘City of Salt’ — gradually transformed the flat coastland into marshland. And with the marshland came the moreish, malaria-ridden mosquitoes. Over the centuries they wreaked havoc on the town's populace, stifling its expansion; and it was not till the Americans began spraying DDT and dredging the marshland in World War II, that the city began to expand, almost doubling in the last 50 years.
Our Airbnb stood on the headland opposite Porto Vecchio, in a private commune called Calla Rosa. As you snake your way to the top, cookie-cutter villas spawn miraculously from the thick, flowering shrubbery, every villa orientated in such an ingenious way as to minimise the sense and scale of urban density. Ours was no different. Concealed behind a pink oleander, the house sported a split-level design: stairs take you down to the main living area, and one of the best views I’ve ever seen — a 90-degree panoramic of Porto Vecchio peninsula — with one tiny little hitch. There’s an old Corsican proverb that says, ‘sweep the lobby so that visitors will think the rest is also clean,’ which felt especially fitting in the circumstances, because no amount of sweeping or doctoring would be able to hide the 150 ft crane towering above our pool.
Ahh, yes, as it turns out, in Corsica May is the time for construction. Everywhere you go you’ll pass planning application signs and trucks leadened down with terracotta and granite blocks. On a jog, my wife and I ran straight through wet cement! In our commune alone, we counted twenty-four ongoing construction projects. However, it wasn’t till 7:30 AM on Monday morning that we discovered the full horror of our folly; awoken as we were by a deafening dawn chorus: birds and JCB trucks singing, crickets and axle-grinders chirping. A thick gauzy blanket of dust swept listlessly across the hillside. I know what you're thinking: ‘rookies!’ We later discovered that all construction has a hard deadline of June 14th — presumably, when the French homeowners start arriving and an extra nought gets added to your invoice? But still...
Even for a family that finds a silver lining in the worst of calamities, this discovery loomed over us like a... well, like a 150 ft crane. But holidays are all about flexibility and amenability and ingenuity, aren’t they? And Corsica is not the type of destination to stay sulking in one’s villa. Corsica’s laurels, as we’d been told, rests on its beaches.
Here’s a beach you should go and see: Plage de Santa Giulia. Sweet heavenly strawberry on a stick, this bay is the closest you’ll ever get to stepping inside a TUI holiday brochure. The bay curls in on itself like a horseshoe, creating a placid, peaceful lagoon of the most striking tropical turquoise. The peroxide blonde sand brushes the underside of your feet like an Andrex puppy on top of a bed of feathers. A south-westerly breeze known locally as the ‘Libeccio’ acts as a balm to the hot May sun. We spent the entire day here, luxuriating in the cool waters, replenishing ourselves in the many beach bars and restaurants that encircle the bay, and in a galaxy far far away from the rollicking cement mixers of Cala Rossa.
Santa Giulia is no anomaly, either. Almost everywhere you drive along the southern coast you’ll pass beaches and coves and lagoons that match, even supersede, Santa Giulia’s spectacular beauty. Some are more popular than others, some are huge, some are tiny; some are barely big enough to host a small family, while some are children friendly, and some aren’t — all possess their own idiosyncratic beauty and charm.
Honestly, what more does one need?
Now on to the bad stuff. Since Covid, we learned that the volume of tourists visiting Corsica is way down; only recently has it shown green shoots of recovery. The hangover from this, coupled with the island’s lack of critical infrastructure, lack of traditional tourist attractions, and lack of international awareness, has helped fuel a steep rise in living costs. That’s right. Here’s the crux: Corsica isn't cheap. Frankly, we were shocked at the cost of the average super-market shop (minus the French wine, which isn’t subject to export tax — whoopee!).
When you consider that cost is the primary factor in consumers’ choice of destination, many tourists will continue to shun Corsica in favour of simpler, packaged, child-friendly, hassle-free holiday.
That being said, it’s expensive almost everywhere these days — it’s still cheaper in Corsica than it is in England — and given Corsica’s appeal remains distinct from those of its European counterparts, there are other important factors to be considered. For one the local populace is friendly and welcoming, which cannot always be said of our increasingly exasperated chums in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Malta. For another, the island has done a lot to conserve its natural surroundings. 40% of the island is protected in the Parc Naturel Régional de Corse, and multiple conservation projects have been launched to protect the coastline and wildlife. Which is all the more admirable when you consider the cost of forgoing mass tourism.
In an ever-urbanising world, as access to nature becomes increasingly difficult, destinations like Corsica, with its mature market and European aesthetic, will become highly sought after. The volume of flights from countries like the UK will steadily increase, the ubiquitous construction will lessen, the prices will stabilise, the beaches will become safaris, and Corsica will cease to be that sapphire in the rough, that un-veiled goddess, that forgotten Euro in the super-market trolley. Corsica will be like everywhere else.
I for one look forward to returning, long before it does.