Porto-Vecchio: The Salt Town and Palombaggia

Required Activities

• Walk the old town on its short rocky ridge and count the five bastions and the Genoese gate — the citadel was first built in 1539 but was knocked down and rebuilt more than once, and the walls you are touching date from 1589

• Walk out to Les Salines, the dozen hectares of salt pans that gave Porto-Vecchio the name cité du sel, and pick out the pan walls and channels still legible in the ground: they turned out around 1,000 tonnes a year between 1795 and 1815, were the only working salt pans left on the island, and closed for good in the 2000s

• Climb to the Castellu d'Araghju on its granite shoulder north of the town, one of five Torrean sites inside this commune along with Turri, Ceccia, Tappa and Bruschicia — Porto-Vecchio is the main seat of the Torrean culture of the third and second millennia BC, and the place called Torre is what the culture is named after

• Swim at two of the three beaches the town is known for and settle which one you would come back to: Palombaggia and Tamaricciu on the same strip south of town, Santa Giulia in its closed bay further on, Cala Rossa on the north side of the gulf

• Drive the road up towards the Ospedale forest and its dam and stop in the hamlets on the way — Ceccia, Arca-Pianelli, Muratello — all of them peopled seasonally by shepherds from Quenza, and the direction the whole town went from mid-June every year to get above the mosquitoes in the plain