29 October 2006 - The Sunday Times - Scotland - Tom Lappin
Restaurants boasting sea views are hardly at a premium on a Mediterranean island. There are, indeed, some places in which it seems to be an unwritten rule that every 100 yards of sand has to support at least three bustling little seafood establishments. However, the sea-view from the Auberge A Magina, on the island of Corsica, is something special.
“Special” because the restaurant is about 10 miles inland, perched on a high slope in the village of Oletta, offering a magnificent vista over craggy terraces, vineyards and meadows all the way back to the perfect cliffs and beaches west of St Florent. It’s a view that seems to take in three or four different nations and geographies in one rich swoop of the eye.
Nationalities are a complex issue on this contentious little island. Unless you are particularly well-grounded in European nationalist politics and history, famous Corsicans usually boil down to a shortlist of one. He being that Ajaccio boy and ambitious megalomaniac, Napoleon, fondly remembered by the French despite the millions he left dead on European battlefields from Lisbon to Lvov.
It’s more than a little strange that a Corsican should have become history’s most famous/notorious Frenchman. Spend more than five minutes on Corsica and it becomes apparent that the island is very far from being a little floating annexe of la belle France. This is an island with a fierce sense of its own identity, one that goes beyond the surface of nationalist graffiti, one that colours an entire way of life.
Not an inconsiderable part of it is the topography, that spine of crags and daunting mountain ridges dressed in the maquis scrub, which started off as cover for local guerrillas fighting Italian occupiers in the second world war and ended up as a catch-all term for the French Resistance.
Corsica’s daunting GR20 long-distance hiking trail attracts a surprising number of takers every year, not a few of them Scots, finding ready opportunities to indulge that covert national masochistic streak. There’s a certain madness involved in tackling such a harsh itinerary when the island offers so much natural beauty better observed at a more relaxed pace.
St Florent, in the north of the island, provides a gentle introduction to some of the island’s most alluring beaches. The Popeye company boats sail regularly from the quayside, a few miles along the shore from the fine silvery sands of Lodo beach.
Disembarking on a beautiful, deserted beach front, the newcomer might wonder why everybody is scuttling off and heading up a cliff path. Follow them, though, and you’ll discover, after an hour or so of leisurely crag-hopping, that the path leads to an even more sublime beach — Saleccia, which boasts finer, more lustrous sand, even more space, and dunes backing the strand.
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