Collioure

Collioure sits right at the point where the Pyrenees finally give up and slide into the Mediterranean, and the result is a light so saturated that in the summer of 1905 it convinced Henri Matisse and André Derain to start painting in colours nobody had used quite that boldly before — violent pinks, unreal greens, skies that had no business being that shade of blue. Art critics called the results Fauves, wild beasts, and the name stuck to the whole movement. Standing on the same shingle beach, watching the afternoon light do genuinely strange things to the water, I understood the impulse immediately.

A church that doubles as a lighthouse

The town’s signature view is the bell tower of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, capped with a pink dome, standing almost in the water at the edge of the old port — it was originally built in the fourteenth century as a lighthouse before the church was added onto it later. We walked out along the small breakwater beside it at sunset, past fishermen untangling nets, and watched the light turn the tower first gold, then that same impossible pink Matisse must have seen.

Anchovies, the château, and the Chemin du Fauvisme

Collioure has cured anchovies since the Middle Ages, and the Roque and Desclaux houses in town still salt and pack them by hand — we bought a jar from a shop near the market and Lia has been rationing it at home ever since, which for her is a genuine act of restraint. Above the harbour, the Château Royal, built and rebuilt by the kings of Majorca and later Vauban, guards the bay, and a marked trail through town called the Chemin du Fauvisme places reproductions of Matisse and Derain’s paintings at the exact spots they were painted, so you can stand in a doorway and watch a hundred-year-old canvas line up with the view in front of you.

When to go: Late spring and September give you the famous light without August’s crowds, when the beach and the old port both fill up fast.