Calvi

Calvi’s citadel sits on a rocky headland at one end of a long, sweeping bay of pale sand and pine forest, the kind of view that made even Lia, who has seen a genuinely excessive number of Mediterranean coastlines by now, stop and just look for a minute before we started walking. The fortress was built by the Genoese in the thirteenth century and stayed loyal to Genoa even during Corsica’s independence movement, which earned the town the motto “Civitas Calvi Semper Fidelis” — Calvi, always faithful — still carved above one of its gates.

The house that claims Columbus

Inside the citadel, a modest stone house carries a plaque asserting that Christopher Columbus was born there in 1441, a claim that most serious historians dismiss but that Calvi maintains with real local pride anyway. We stood in front of it for a while, genuinely unsure whether to believe it, before deciding the ambiguity was more fun than a definitive answer would have been. More reliably documented: the citadel was also a base for the French Foreign Legion for over half a century, and a small monument inside honours their history in the town.

The bay below

From the citadel walls, the whole bay opens out — nearly six kilometres of pale sand backed by a pine forest called the Pinède, with the Balagne region’s terraced hills rising green behind it and, on a clear day, the peaks of Corsica’s interior visible beyond that. We walked down into the Pinède in the late afternoon, swam off a quiet stretch of beach with almost nobody else around, and watched the citadel go orange, then pink, as the sun dropped behind it.

When to go: June and September give you warm swimming water and long light without August’s full crowds along the bay.