Calanche de Piana

On the west coast of Corsica, between the village of Piana and the little port of Porto, the mountains come down to the sea as a maze of red granite needles, towers and overhangs. The Corsicans call them calanche; French guidebooks borrowed the word as "calanques", although they have nothing in common with the limestone inlets near Marseille. Here the rock is the colour of embers, it rises in jagged crests to about 700 metres, and it drops in cliffs to the deep blue Gulf of Porto. A single narrow road threads through it, clinging to the walls, squeezing through notches and crossing ravines on bridges and retaining walls.

The calanche belong to the crystalline western half of Corsica, built of plutonic rock that cooled deep underground. Exposed at the surface, the granite has been worked on by wind, salt spray, rain and changes of temperature, which hollow it into cavities known as tafoni, open arches and isolated pinnacles. The result reads like a gallery of figures, and people have been naming them for a long time: a castle, a pair of lovers, a dog's head, a bishop. When Guy de Maupassant crossed the calanche at dusk in 1880, he wrote of pink granite giants twisted by time into monks, a seated bishop, a crouching lion and a horned devil's head, and ranked the place among the wonders of the world. A decade later Prince Roland Bonaparte described the contrast of red rock, dark green maquis and blue sea as among the most beautiful scenery on the island.

Since 1983 the calanche have formed part of a UNESCO World Heritage site together with the Gulf of Porto, the Gulf of Girolata and the Scandola nature reserve across the water. The slopes are clothed in holm oak and dense maquis, and a protected zone covers the green oak woods and rock formations on the land of Piana and Ota.

The road is spectacular, but the calanche are best seen on foot. A short path from the hairpin known as the Tête du Chien leads in about an hour down to the rock called the Château Fort, high above the gulf; another follows an old mule track paved with stone and held up by dry-stone walls, climbing to a pass with a sweeping view over the whole maze, the gulf, Scandola and the village of Piana. The finest light is at the end of the day, when the setting sun turns the granite a deep blood red — exactly the hour at which Maupassant saw it.

Getting there

The calanche lie along the D81 coast road between Piana and Porto, in Corse-du-Sud, about 46 km from Ajaccio as the crow flies (considerably further by the winding road). The nearest airport in a straight line is Calvi Sainte-Catherine (CLY), about 27 km away; Ajaccio Napoleon Bonaparte Airport (AJA), about 47 km away, is the other option. There is no walking access from the road down to the sea within the calanche; the trails start from lay-bys along the D81.