Collioure

Why go

Collioure is France with a Catalan accent: flags with red and gold stripes, anchovies salted the old way, and terraced vineyards climbing straight up from the sea. In 1905 Matisse and Derain came for a summer and went home having invented a new way to paint, and once you see the colours here, the pink and ochre houses against a blue that hardly seems real, you understand why. It is small, so come early, swim off the little beaches and climb to the forts above.

History

Collioure was a port long before it was a postcard; it is mentioned in the seventh century, and its sheltered coves made it the natural harbour of Roussillon. The Knights Templar had a house here, and in the thirteenth century the castle by the sea was rebuilt at its expense. From 1276 to 1343 Roussillon belonged to the kings of Majorca, whose capital was Perpignan, and Collioure was their port and one of their residences.

The town then passed to the Crown of Aragon and later to Spain, and the Emperor Charles V had the star-shaped Fort Saint-Elme built on the hill above to guard the coast. Only in 1659, with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, did Roussillon and Collioure become French. Vauban reworked the royal castle and had part of the old upper town razed to give the fortress room, which pushed the townspeople down to the shore.

There, at the water’s edge, the church of Notre-Dame-des-Anges was built at the end of the seventeenth century; its round bell tower, once a medieval watchtower, stands with its feet in the sea. Fishing, especially for anchovies, kept the town alive into the twentieth century.

In May 1905 Henri Matisse came to Collioure, and André Derain joined him in July. Painting side by side in pure, unmixed colour, they produced the canvases that scandalised the Salon d’Automne that autumn and earned them the nickname ‘fauves', wild beasts. In February 1939 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, fleeing the end of the Civil War with his mother, reached Collioure exhausted and ill; he died there on 22 February and lies in the town cemetery.