Porquerolles: The National Park Island

Required Activities

• Pick one of the island's two circuits and finish it: east on the easy track to the long beaches of la Courtade and Notre-Dame, or west on the harder one over the mont de Tiélo and the montagne de Robert to the plage d'Argent and the calanque du Maure — and on either, climb to the semaphore at 142 m, the highest point on the island

• Walk out to the col du Langoustier at 43 m, look down on the two beaches below it, and then swim off each in turn: the white sand, and the black sand that takes its colour from the waste of the soda works that ran here on the Leblanc process until 1876

• Climb to the 16th-century château Sainte-Agathe above the village and find the damage from 1793, when an English admiral sheltering his fleet here was asked to dinner by a French commandant who had no idea what was happening on the mainland — while the Frenchman was being plied with drink, English sailors landed, cleared out the garrison and blew the fort up

• Walk the collections of the national Mediterranean botanical conservatory, which the park has run here since 1979, and find the flax-leaved broom, Genista linifolia, native to Porquerolles and otherwise growing only in the Canaries, Iberia, Italy and North Africa

• In the village, laid out from 1820 at the head of the bay, go into the church of Sainte-Anne of 1850 and work along the stations of the cross an anonymous soldier cut into them with a knife, then find the 18th-century windmill above the village and the lighthouse of 1837