King of Aragon's Staircase, Bonifacio

Bonifacio stands on a narrow blade of white limestone at the southern tip of Corsica, its houses pressed right up to the edge of cliffs that drop sheer into the sea. Cut diagonally down the face of those cliffs is a single stairway of 189 steps. Seen from a boat in the strait below, it shows as a thin dark slash across the pale rock; seen from its top, it is a vertiginous chute that descends about 53 metres at an angle close to 45 degrees, in places no more than 80 centimetres wide.

The name comes from a story rather than from its builders. In 1420 King Alfonso V of Aragon laid siege to Bonifacio for five months, pressing a claim to Corsica based on old papal grants to his family. Local legend holds that his soldiers carved the whole stairway in a single night to take the town by surprise, and were beaten back at the top. The more prosaic explanation is that the stairs were cut over a much longer period by Franciscan monks, to reach a spring of fresh water in the grotto of Saint-Barthélemy at the foot of the cliff — a precious resource on a rock with no water of its own.

That need for water left other traces. In the nineteenth century a well was sunk above the grotto, the Puits Saint-Barthélemy, where buckets hauled by wind and animal power raised slightly brackish water to a cistern holding some 21,700 litres. The stairway itself is owned by the department and has been a registered historic monument since 1994.

Going down is the whole point: at the bottom, by the sea, you look back up at the old town hanging overhead on its layered limestone, and out across the strait that separates Corsica from Sardinia.

Getting there

The stairway starts from the upper town (haute ville) of Bonifacio, the walled old town on the clifftop. The nearest airport is Figari Sud-Corse (FSC), about 14 km away.