Arrividerci Sardinia, Bonjour Corsica

We arrive in the port town of Santa Teresa Gallura with modest expectations, island ferry port towns are sometimes low key affairs which don’t score highly on the attractive scale. Not so Santa Teresa where we are pleasantly surprised to the point of amazed as we turn from a quiet street into the main piazza where gentle soul music issues from one bar and 70s disco from another in as welcoming a scene as you could wish to encounter.

Numerous restaurants line several of the streets leading away from the square, chatter and laughter fill the air and the ambience is one of casual enjoyment, there is truly a feeling of chill, albeit perhaps slightly upmarket chill. Menu prices, to our surprise given our modest expectations, reflect this – everything seems a euro or five more than previous towns.

In fact there’s something of a micro economy in Santa Teresa, a town where you are charged one euro PER DRINK for the privilege of sitting at a table, and a town where you can only enter the public beach by making a reservation in advance, then paying 3.50 entry fee plus 6 more euros for the obligatory raffia mat to go under your towel. It is, remarkably, forbidden to place your own towel directly on the sand. So 9.50 euros per person to go on the beach. No thank you Santa Teresa!

In its defence though, Santa Teresa Gallura is very clean and the food, in our limited experience, good enough to at least not feel too much of a rip off at these increased prices. Storm clouds gather over our two days here, humidity levels rise and the sun for the most part hides behind a thick cloud covering. And so we leave Sardinia, bound for Corsica on the blue and white Moby ferry heading for the white cliffs of Bonifacio.

Approaching Bonifacio by boat is pretty amazing, the town clutching the very edge of the lofty cliffs, city walls equally precarious, remains of the castle heading the view. Inside the city walls the tiny streets bustle with many visitors but the whole place oozes interest and photographic prompts. The shift from Italian to French is unmistakable – we thought the cuisine change might be more subtle, but the menus demonstrate complete revision for the sake of a short stretch of water. Unfortunately we ourselves haven’t made the switch quite so easily and we’re still all grazie and bongiorno when we should be merci and bonjour. D’oh.

Named after Boniface II of Tuscany who constructed the impressive fortress and thus enabled the town to grow, Bonifacio has at different times come under the power of many, ranging from the Spanish Moors to the Papacy. A significant section of the town is the citadel within the walls – walls which form towering defences on the already sheer cliffs.

After a period of Genoese rule which oversaw a lengthy period of uprising and peasants’ revolts, Corsica was ceded to France in 1768 as a thank you for French help in quelling the unrest – though how about this for a fascinating fact…Bonifacio is closer to TWENTY other capital cities than it is to Paris. As claims to fame go, that’s a pretty good one, though the fact that Bonifacio was until recently a major administrative centre for the French Foreign Legion runs it a close second.

With only a week to explore Corsica we collect our next rental car and choose our destinations carefully, heading first northwards along the west coast through magnificent scenery destined for somewhere truly spectacular.

A modicum of research into the island of Corsica reveals that one of its delights is spectacular drives through stunning scenery, so we plan our journey here to take in some of these. Happily, the final section of our initial drive is one of the top five widely recommended, though we are already taken in by the magnificent scenery and pretty villages long before we hit that section.

The renowned 12-kilometre stretch (sounds short, takes ages) starts at the ridiculously attractive village of Piana and runs to our next base, Porto Ota. To say that we are enchanted by what we see on this drive is a massive understatement, this is an incredibly stunning, unique stretch of coastline which is nothing short of mind blowing. 

Known as the Calanques (or Calanches) de Piana, the area basks in the most spectacular colouring: cliffs which range from pink to red, enchanting shades of greenery, hints of autumn colours in the leaves of thousands of chestnut trees, all backed of course by the deep blue Med. Every time we stop to admire and swoon at another amazing view, the scent in the air is akin to walking in to an alternative medicine clinic, so heavy are the perfumes of mountain herbs.

Eucalyptus, something that smells like mountain thyme, and another scent which we recognise but can’t quite identify, bring an instant karma to accompany the sensational views. Maybe I should stop writing and let Michaela’s photographs do the talking….

Calanques, in this case volcanic, are created when caves collapse to form gulleys and valleys; the unique pink-red colouring of the rocks here was formed when the limestone rock became permeated by hematite, which is dehydrated iron oxide. We only know all this from Wikipedia – if you see something this unusual, you have to look it up! 

And so we arrive in Porto Ota and are delighted with our next base. It may be a mostly newly built village to accommodate visitors like us, but the development is understated and sympathetic, no hotel has more than 20-odd rooms and nothing is above a modest height. Moreover, the village is built predominantly from local stone and somehow conveys the perfect “mountain village” vibe despite being by the sea. It’s actually lovely despite its youthfulness and we commend its designers and architects.

In our short time in Porto Ota, we are to return to Piana and to the Calanques, spend time simply sitting watching the sea crash over the rocks in the village, and enjoy the heady combination of fabulous food in a terrific setting. 

What we don’t get is a boat trip to see the Calanques from a different angle: once again, all boat trips are suspended due to the winds. It’s become a theme on this trip, but here in Porto Ota it’s more than compensated for by the mesmerising glory of the crashing waves.

We could easily stay another day in these lovely surroundings, but there’s more of those spectacular drives to do, more of Corsica to see.