The Spelunca Gorge: The Mule Path From Évisa to Ota

Required Activities

• Pick up the mule path where it leaves the D84 at the west end of Évisa at 850 m, on the Tra Mare e Monti that runs from Calenzana down to Cargèse, and read the lecterns as you go — there are twenty-five of them, on the wildlife, the trees, how a mule track was built and how a Genoese bridge was built

• Stand on the pont de Zaglia and read it from below first: one arch, drawn up in 1712 and not built until 1797 by the Genoese master mason Antonio Bensa, span sized for the Tavulella in flood, both abutments set straight onto the rock chaos of the banks, and a humpbacked deck surfaced with cobbles out of the river under your feet

• Finish at the place called les 2 ponts, and work out why it is plural: the D124 crosses the Tavulella on one bridge and the Lonca on the other, and it is below them that the two join and the water starts being called the Porto

• Below the Zaglia bridge, find where the Aïtone comes in and doubles the Tavulella, then look up at the huge rock over the gorge at U Castellu — local legend puts a castle of the Leca up there, pulled down in the 17th century, and nothing but the legend says so

• Carry on up from les 2 ponts to Ota over the pont de Pianella, a 15th-century Genoese bridge on the Porto and three hundred years older than Zaglia, and from halfway along pick out Capu d'Ota, the 890-metre slab of rock standing over the village