Vizzavona

The mountain train from Ajaccio takes ninety minutes to reach Vizzavona, and in those ninety minutes it passes through seventeen tunnels, crosses viaducts that were engineering marvels when they were built in 1894, and gains a thousand meters of altitude. I had a compartment to myself until Bocognano, where three walkers with enormous packs got on and we climbed in silence through the forest. The station at Vizzavona is a small stone building in a clearing in the trees. When I stepped onto the platform, the sound of Ajaccio — the traffic, the port, the particular noise of a town that has things to prove — was completely gone. What replaced it was wind in the laricio pines and, somewhere below, the sound of water moving over rock.

Laricio pine is the primary substance of this forest — trees that grow to forty meters and live for centuries, their trunks straight as columns, their crowns high and sparse. The light that comes through them falls in long shafts, and the forest floor is carpeted in needles and moss and nothing else. Walking here is not like walking in most forests. It is quieter. The scale is larger. The sense of something old and indifferent to human schedules is stronger. The GR20 passes through Vizzavona at its midpoint — the trail’s famous dividing line, where the demanding northern section ends and the somewhat more forgiving southern half begins. In July, the hamlet is a staging post of sleeping bags and trekking poles and people whose knees hurt. In May it was nearly empty and entirely itself.

The Cascades des Anglais — the English Waterfalls, named for the Victorian tourists who first made them famous in the British Alpine press — are reached in forty minutes from the station, through forest that makes you feel as though you’ve walked into the nineteenth century’s idea of wilderness. The cascade drops in three stages over smooth granite into a pool that is, to be honest, extremely cold. I swam in it anyway, alone, in June, and understood immediately why those Victorians came back year after year to a place that required a train and a ferry and two days of travel to reach.

The hamlet has a hotel, a refuge for GR20 hikers, and a restaurant where the menu has a certain geological permanence. I ate a chestnut soup that tasted of the forest I’d just walked through, and then a slice of fiadone — brocciu cheese cake — and then I sat outside on the terrace and watched the light change in the trees until the return train appeared at the treeline and the station briefly became the busiest place in the forest.

When to go: May through October. The forest is extraordinary in early autumn when the chestnuts turn — late September to mid-October, the trees go gold and the ground becomes the color of rust. June for the waterfalls at their peak flow. The mountain train from Ajaccio and Corte runs year-round, making Vizzavona one of the rare places in Corsica’s interior accessible without a car — which gives it a different kind of visitor, and a better one.