Bonifacio

Why go

Nothing in mainland France prepares you for Bonifacio. The old town sits on a narrow blade of white limestone, its houses built right to the edge of cliffs that the sea has hollowed out beneath them. Below lies a long, fjord-like harbour; across the strait, on a clear day, you can see Sardinia. It feels more Ligurian than French, with its Genoese walls and Italianate churches, and the turquoise coves and islands around it are among the most beautiful in the Mediterranean.

History

Tradition holds that the town was founded or refounded around 828–833 by Boniface II, margrave of Tuscany, who had been charged with defending Corsica against Saracen raids and gave the place his name. Its documented history begins in 1195, when the Genoese took it and began turning the cliff-top into a fortress. Genoa and Pisa fought hard over this citadel, a key link in their sea routes.

Under Genoa, Bonifacio became a colony repopulated with Genoese and Ligurian families, whose dialect still survives, and it resisted repeated attacks. In 1420 King Alfonso V of Aragon besieged it for five months and then gave up. Legend credits his troops with cutting a staircase of 189 steps into the cliff face in a single night; the steps are real, the night is not.

In 1553, still weakened by plague, the town fell to the Ottoman corsair Dragut, said to have been acting for the French commander, the Marshal de Termes, in a war against Genoa; it was sacked. It returned to Genoese rule, and like the rest of Corsica became French only in the eighteenth century; French royal artillerymen took possession of the town in April 1769. In January 1793 a young Napoleon Bonaparte lodged here while preparing an expedition against Sardinia.

In 1855 the French frigate La Sémillante was wrecked on the Lavezzi islands with the loss of hundreds of soldiers and sailors; two military cemeteries remain on the islands. Today Bonifacio is the southernmost commune of mainland France, and its strait is protected as a marine nature reserve.