Travel guide Corsica

If there's one must-try cheese in Corsica, it's brocciu, eaten with bread, pulenda or prepared in traditional recipes like fiadone. Brocciu is rarely absent from any meal, in one form or another. As the poet Émile Bergerat once said: "If you haven't tasted it, you don't know the island!

The making of Corsican knives is a time-honored skill that demands rigor. Endowed with great symbolic power, a knife could be passed down as part of a family heirloom. The three most common types are the shepherd's knife, the stylet, a type of dagger that appeared in the ^16th century, and the mythical folding "vendetta".

The Corsicans pay tribute to their dead on the very places of the event. At the roadside, crosses, always maintained and flowered, are set up for the victims of road accidents or for the resistance fighters of the last war. In houses or cars, small palm crucifixes are found as lucky charms.

This dry sausage made of meat and liver of pig nustrale, flavoured with spices and garlic, is the most famous of the Corsican sausages. It can be eaten as is, accompanied by pulenda and brocciu, or cooked with starchy foods. It goes perfectly with red beans, red wine and pancetta in the traditional Tianu.

The maquis is characteristic of the rich and varied vegetation found in Corsica. There are 78 endemic species, i.e. species specific to the island. The most present plants are strawberry tree, myrtle, immortelle, cyst, thyme, mastic pistachio or broom. Many of them can be found in the local gastronomy.

An integral part of the Corsican identity, one of the singular features of the local music is the polyphony, or a capella singing performed in several voices. Sacred or profane, there are a large number of variants which differ in their forms and in the themes they address, although the latter are most often inspired by local history.

He is called a moose, he is with the mouflon a legendary figure of the island. With its dark coat, short legs and stocky appearance, it is recognizable in the blink of an eye when you come across it on the roads. Prized by hunters for its unique meat taste, it is eaten as a stew, or stufatu di cignale, a local culinary specialty.

These megaliths, emblematic of the island's archaeological wealth, stand out from the different groups of European and Mediterranean menhir statues with their original iconography (morphology, carved weapons). There are 38 monuments of this type, the oldest dating from the end of the 3rd millennium and the most recent from between 1500 and 1000 BC.

This geological term comes from the Corsican tafone , meaning "hole", and designates a rounded cavity whose dimensions can range from a few dozen centimetres to several metres. Resulting from the erosion of magmatic rocks under the action of humidity, they often form magnificent natural sculptures, like the lion of Cap de Roccapina.

Probably adopted by Sardinia and Corsica at a time when the kingdom of Aragon dominated the Mediterranean islands, the Moor's head symbolized the Crusaders' victory over the Moors. It was officially and definitively adopted by the Corsicans thanks to Pasquale Paoli, who chose this flag for the Corsican nation founded in 1762.

Mentalities have evolved in Corsica and there are no longer, as in the last century, families that kill each other for several generations. Nevertheless, the sense of honor, respect and duty is still very much alive, and the Corsicans have a very strict code of moral and social conventions. It is important to pay attention to this.

For the Corsicans, they represent a return to their roots, an identity and an ancestral way of life. For tourists, they are objects of fascination. Perched on steep mountains or curled up in the hollow of turquoise bays, their architecture blends harmoniously with the surrounding landscape, as if they were carved directly out of stone.