We go to Corsica (Part I)

Palombaggia beach. Best beach in Europe?

It’s been a while since our last blog; we have much to talk about! Big news on the administrative front: our paperwork for our second year-long visa has been submitted, and accepted. We’ve received a paper, essentially a receipt for our docs, which gives us permission to stay for six months. Sometime during that period we will receive a residency visa, our Carte de Séjour, good until October of 2021. If we choose to stay for a third year, things should get easier… (or so they say!) 

We’ve also signed up for another year in the apartment where we’ve been living since May (see our blog on that move here). And, we’ve applied for our own utility accounts, electric and Internet. And, we have received our Carte de Vitale, giving us access to the excellent French health care system! So we have a sense of settling in, of being rooted at bit. 

And that brings us to the more recent news: we finally went on a trip! Spent a week in Corsica! After cancelling several excursions due to weather (hot!), the on-going pandemic, and just stuff that came up, we’re happy to have finally gotten away. 

 

The territory. Yellow stars show where we were.

         Corsica: It’s got mountainous! (and beaches…)

There are two major islands off Italy’s west coast; Corsica is the smaller and more northern, and is known for being the birthplace of Napoléon Bonaparte. As expected, it has a long and involved history; for most of the modern era it’s been under the control of the Genovese. Pisa took it over a few times, but Genoa always beat them back. There was an independence movement in the mid-1700s; France secretly bought the island from Genoa; Corsica was aligned with the United Kingdom for a few years. But after the French Revolution (1790’s), France ended up with control of the island. 

While it looks small on the map, there is a lot of territory to cover, and it became clear from our research that for our one week it would be better to focus on either the north, or the south. We picked the south, and so flew into FIgiari, a small airport which some describe as an airfield in a cow pasture. Well, it is small… but no cows! 

Corsica has two main features: beautiful blue water, and steep, sparsely-populated mountains. Not surprisingly, things to do on Corsica center around boating (warm turquoise waters!), swimming (incredible white-sand beaches!), and hiking (rugged mountain trails!). Oh, and motorcycling, if you’re into laying it around steep winding mountain roads. 

The citadel, the old town, seen from the harbor.

Paula did her usual excellent job of booking accommodations: two days here, a day there, three days in Ajaccio, and one night close to the airport for our early-morning flight back to Montpellier. Our first B&B offered dinner for an extra charge. We normally prefer not to eat where we stay, but (fortunately!) made an exception this time. 

The owners’ son had been a professional chef, but gave up the tough life and long hours to serve just a few meals per night, cooking for his parents’ guests. Our second night there we joined with a couple of the other guests for this special meal. And my, was it amazing! It was a full-on five-course meal, with an apéritif before, wine during, and the digestif after. All for 25 euros each. We were up quite late chatting with our fellow lodgers. And in the end, we all agreed that it was good we only had a few feet to walk to get to our beds!

Looking down from the old town on the harbor.

Our first stop after arriving was Bonifacio, the major city in the south. “Major city” is a bit misleading: it is a large city in the south, but the topography prevents it from growing much. So it’s small, with a fine natural harbor. It was quite crowded the day we were there, in mid-September. Like everywhere in Corsica, it must really be a mad house in August! (And July. And June…).

 

Bonifacio is on the circuit for the rich and famous with their mega-yachts. There's also red boats!

A "composed" panorama of the cliffs stretching away from Bonifacio.

         Beaches

Corsica claims some of the best beaches in Europe. Having grown up on the beaches of California I’m not overly drawn to beachs, but we did spend our first couple of days tracking down some really wonderful spots. They weren’t easy to get to, but that didn’t seem to stop anybody from going!

 

On our first full day in Corsica (Monday), we signed up for a boat ride out of Bonifacio.  It was your standard tour boat stuff, but it gave us a view from the water of the coast a few miles on either side of the town. The steep cliffs on which the old town is built are quite fantastic, and have to be seen from the water to be fully appreciated.

 

Houses in Bonifacio clinging to the cliffs as they've done for centuries'. 

The staircase of King Aragon, down leading to a well. It's now open to the public, but we declined to descend the 187 0ne-foot steps!

Back in the car after our boat tour we were ready to look for some of the fabled beaches of Corsica. One long, broad anchorage we visited on the boat had a hidden beach at the far end, and from the water we could see a narrow, steep road running up into the hills. Access to that beach, surely! A few minutes with the map and we were headed out of town, looking for an inconspicuous turnoff from the main road. 

A small cove. Looks like the Caribbean!

 

A boat anchored in the cove with our "secret" beach.

It wasn’t hard to find, and ten white-knuckle minutes later we were at the bottom of the steep, straight, and very narrow strip of concrete that served as a road. We tucked the car tightly up against the bank, like the other cars there, and made the short walk to the beach. 

We made it! There's a few more boats in the cove than before.

The "secret" beach. We had our picnic on the left.

The cove was now quite full of boats, many, no doubt, stopping for lunch. We ate our own picnic lunch, then eased into the warm, pristine water. It was lovely! Really, really lovely. The sand was soft underfoot, and the water buoyant. We played around for a bit, and then slowly made our way back to the car. After all, there were many more beaches to sample!

 

The road back. Ya call that a road? You call that a parking lot?

Our favorite beach was Tonnara Beach. It was easy to get to, had a good café, and I liked the very coarse sand. The near-by islets, backed by layers of steep mountains, is incredibly picturesque. Since it was near to where we were staying for the first couple of days, and pretty low-key, we went there several times.

Tonnara beach; view from the café.

The beach itself.

More than just a beach! There's a LOT of coast here...

Palombaggia beach.

A beach mentioned as “one of the best in Europe” seemed worth looking for. And we did, indeed, look! Access was via a winding mountain road (which describes most of the roads on Corsica). After a few false starts down some winding unpaved roads (hell no! I’m not driving on this!) we finally got there. Or, at least, into the hills above the beach. We knew we were close enough when we saw the cars lining the sides of the road. 

 

That's our car, head of the line on the left. Two hours later... and this is mid-September!

Scene at the bottom. So glad we parked on top!

Great, soft white sand on this beach, and lots of room!

But we found a shady spot under the pines.

Once we got the car tucked up against the cliff and mostly off the roadway we had a bit of a walk, down and down a steep road—clogged with cars returning from the overflowing parking at the bottom. The beach itself was pretty fantastic, though: long, long crescents of white sand in both directions, bordered with pine trees on the land side, and that beautiful turquoise water on the other. We found a shady spot up under the pines to lay out our stuff, then slowly immersed ourselves in that warm, embracing water. Again, soft sand underfoot, and limpid clear water. Only this time there were a lot more people. Oh, it wasn’t crowded; this was a very long beach! But it was mid-September; I’ll bet a month ago it was far more populated (and the task of finding a place to park much more difficult!).

 

Palombaggia beach from the road.

 

So that was our first few days on Corsica. In the next part of this blog we'll talk about our time driving through the mountains, visiting the city of Corte, and the days we spent in Ajaccio, the capital city.

 

Another "best beach," further north on the west coast. We didn't visit this one, just drove by...