Bonifacio
"Half the town looks like it's one bad storm away from going into the sea, and it's been standing there for eight hundred years anyway."
A Genoese citadel town on Corsica's southern tip, its pale limestone houses balanced right on the edge of cliffs that drop sheer into the Mediterranean, with a stairway cut into the rock said to have been carved in a single night.
Bonifacio sits on a narrow limestone spur at Corsica’s southern tip, and from the water, sailing in past cliffs streaked white and ochre, the haute ville looks genuinely improbable — tall Genoese houses built right to the cliff edge, some with their foundations visibly overhanging the drop below. Lia, who is not easily rattled by heights, kept a firm grip on the railing the first time we walked the ramparts and looked straight down at the sea a hundred metres under our feet.
The staircase built in a night
The Escalier du Roi d’Aragon is a stairway of 187 steps cut directly into the cliff face, running from the citadel down almost to the waterline, and local legend claims Aragonese troops besieging the town in 1420 carved it in a single night to launch a surprise attack — a story that’s almost certainly untrue, since the steps more likely predate the siege and were used to reach a freshwater well below, but it’s told with enough conviction in town that we didn’t have the heart to argue. We climbed down and back up, which was considerably harder than the legend made it sound.
The marina below, and the islands beyond
Below the citadel, Bonifacio’s marina is lined with restaurants serving the day’s catch, and boats leave regularly for the short crossing to the Îles Lavezzi, a scatter of granite islets and turquoise coves protected as a marine reserve just off the coast. We took the boat out one clear morning, swam in water so clear the anchor chain was visible from the deck, and looked back at the whole citadel from the water — pale limestone against an even paler sky, the houses stacked right up to the cliff edge exactly as improbably as they’d looked on the way in.
When to go: Late spring through early autumn for the boat trips to the Lavezzi islands and warm swimming water; the cliffside walks are pleasant nearly year-round given Corsica’s mild winters.