The short answer is June or September, and if you can only take one, September. The longer answer is that Corsica has a narrower good season than the Mediterranean average, because the sea takes a long time to warm and…
Supporting Guide
Getting to Corsica and Around
Two decisions, and the second one matters more than people expect. Which airport or port you arrive at determines the whole shape of your trip, because Corsica is long and the roads are slow. And whether you hire a car…
Where to Eat in Corsica and What to Order
Corsican food is not French food and it is not Italian food. It is mountain cooking from a poor island, built on three things: pigs that live half wild in the chestnut woods, sheep and goats, and the chestnut itself….
Where to Stay in Corsica: Choosing Your Base
The most useful sentence in this guide: you cannot see Corsica from one base. The island is a hundred and eighty kilometres long with a mountain range down the middle, so the roads go around rather than across. Two bases…
The Best Corsica Boat Tours
More of Corsica is off the road than on it. An entire UNESCO listed reserve has no land access at all. The best beach in the north is a boat ride or a four and a half hour walk. The…
Calvi and the Balagne
The gentlest part of Corsica, and the easiest to love on a first trip. The Balagne was once called the garden of Corsica, and the shape of it explains why: mountains close behind, a fertile strip of olive and fig…
Scandola and the Gulf of Porto
Three things sit next to each other on the west coast of Corsica, and together they are UNESCO listed: the Scandola nature reserve, the Gulf of Girolata, and the Calanques de Piana. It is the most dramatic stretch of coast…
Bonifacio: The Town on the Cliffs
From the sea it looks like a mistake somebody got away with. Bonifacio sits on a spine of white chalk at the southern tip of Corsica, and the sea has spent several thousand years eating away underneath it. So the…
The Best Beaches in Corsica
The water is the thing. Corsica sits in deep water with no shallow shelf, so the sea comes in clear over pale granite sand and bands out from almost colourless at the shore, through turquoise, to a deep ink blue…
A Corsica Itinerary: 7 to 10 Days
The mistake with Corsica is the map. It looks like an island you could loop in three days. It is a hundred and eighty kilometres long with a mountain range down the middle, so the roads go around rather than…
The Best Things to Do in Corsica
Corsica’s problem, if it is one, is that most of the good things are at opposite ends of a slow island. So this is ordered by what is genuinely worth building a day around rather than by geography, with a…
Day Trips from Alghero
Alghero sits in the best-placed corner of Sardinia for getting out of town, and one of the trips is genuinely among the great drives in the Mediterranean. Here they are in the order I would do them, with honest timings,…
