Swim at the Spiaggia del Principe, the crescent of white sand on the Costa Smeralda, on the coast developed from 1962 under Karim Aga Khan IV

Walk the Piazzetta and the marina of Porto Cervo, the resort village at the centre of the Costa Smeralda

Go into the Stella Maris church in Porto Cervo, the white church built in 1968 above the marina

Walk around the bay of Cala di Volpe and see its hotel, the fantasy castle-style hotel of 1963 on the Costa Smeralda

Swim at Capriccioli, the beach of pink granite boulders on the Costa Smeralda

The Costa Smeralda was developed from 1962 under Karim Aga Khan IV, and Porto Cervo sits at the centre of it with its Piazzetta, its marina and the white church of Stella Maris built above them in 1968. The coast either side is granite and water: the crescent of the Spiaggia del Principe, the pink boulders at Capriccioli, and the hotel thrown up at Cala di Volpe in 1963 in the style of a castle that never existed.

The Costa Smeralda: Porto Cervo and the Granite Coves

Stand in the central chamber of La Prisgiona and look up into the false dome — over eight metres of stone corbelled inwards course by course, holding itself up with no mortar and no arch

Find the meeting hut in the village and count the places round its ring-shaped bench: twelve, set facing inwards

Find the well in the courtyard, sunk more than seven metres, and work out what that depth says about how long the place expected to be lived in

Walk the village and pick out how many of the excavated huts you can still read on the ground, and where the excavated ground stops

At Coddu Vecchiu, trace the corridor dolmen of the earliest phase, about ten metres end to end, then find where the later nuragic rebuilding was added in front of it

Two Bronze Age sites stand within a few hundred metres of each other outside Arzachena. The nuraghe of La Prisgiona was lived in from the 14th to the 9th century BC: its central chamber carries a false dome more than eight metres high, a well over seven metres deep sits in the courtyard, and fifteen of the huts of the village around it have been excavated, among them a meeting hut with a ring-shaped bench. The giants’ tomb of Coddu Vecchiu was built in three goes — a corridor dolmen about ten metres long in the Chalcolithic, reuse in the early Bronze Age, and rebuilding in the middle Bronze Age, in the nuragic period proper.

Arzachena: La Prisgiona and the Giants’ Tomb of Coddu Vecchiu

Take the ferry from Palau to La Maddalena, the main island of the La Maddalena Archipelago National Park, created in 1994

Visit the Compendio Garibaldino on Caprera, the home and grave of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who died there in 1882

Take a boat trip round the archipelago to Spargi, Santa Maria and Budelli, and see the Spiaggia Rosa on Budelli from the water

Swim off the granite rocks and coves of the archipelago from the boat

The La Maddalena Archipelago has been a national park since 1994, reached by the car ferry from Palau. Caprera holds the Compendio Garibaldino, the house Giuseppe Garibaldi lived in and the grave he was buried in when he died there in 1882. Boats run out round Spargi, Santa Maria and Budelli, where the Spiaggia Rosa is looked at from the water rather than walked on.

La Maddalena Archipelago: Caprera, Garibaldi and the Pink Beach

Walk the Haute Ville the length of its cape — 1,600 m long and barely 100 m wide — out to the houses built on the lip of the undercut limestone, which have given the impression of imminent collapse for centuries without troubling anybody who lives in them

Go down the 189 steps of the Escalier du roi d'Aragon, cut straight into the cliff face, and decide for yourself which story the stair fits: legend says Aragon's troops dug it in a single night during the 1420 siege, but it was more likely cut over much longer by Franciscan monks to reach the Saint-Barthélémy spring in the cave at the foot

Take the boat out under the cliffs and pick out the Grain de Sable, the single block of limestone standing out of the water a few tens of metres off the foot of the cliff, then look up at how far the sea has eaten in under the town

Find the cistern built in 1318 under the loggia beside Sainte-Marie-Majeure to catch the rain off the roofs — on a limestone cape with no spring, that roof water was how the town outlasted a fleet sitting offshore — and go inside the 12th- and 13th-century church for Nicolas Carrega's 20th-century glass

Cross to the Lavezzi and find both of the Sémillante's cemeteries — Acharino on the west of the island, Furcone on the east — where 560 of the 773 dead lie, and read the plaque at Furcone that says their remains are mingled here with their men's

Walk out along the clifftop to the Capo Pertusato light, inaugurated in 1844, and from there look across the bouches de Bonifacio to Sardinia — a strait known for violent water and now run as an international reserve

Bonifacio's old town, the Haute Ville, sits on a cape of white limestone 1,600 m long and barely 100 m wide, which the sea has undercut so far that the houses on the edge look about to fall — and have looked that way for centuries. It is the southernmost commune of metropolitan France, across the strait from Sardinia. On 21 October 1420 Alfonso V of Aragon landed with a fleet of 31 vessels and was thrown back by a Genoese garrison of 250; on 28 December Gianno de Campofregoso forced the blockade and resupplied the town, and on 5 January 1421 Alfonso lifted the siege, called away to help Joanna II of Naples. The commune runs out to the Lavezzi islands, where the frigate Sémillante — 773 men aboard, bound for the Crimea — struck a shoal in thick fog on 15 February 1855 with no survivors.

Bonifacio: The Town on the Edge of the Cliff

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

The Genoese founded a colony at Porto-Vecchio and built its fortress in 1539 against Barbary raids, and it failed again and again — malaria, corsairs anchored offshore and attacks by the Corsicans emptied it several times, until Genoa settled mountain families from Quenza in the citadel. It is called the salt town: its salt marshes, about ten hectares, produced around 1,000 tonnes of salt a year between 1795 and 1815 and are abandoned now. Today it is Corsica's third town, known for the beaches around it — Palombaggia, Santa Giulia, Cala Rossa.

Porto-Vecchio: The Salt Town and Palombaggia

In Sainte-Marie, built from 1766 after the old church collapsed, find the cross and the chain of the Catenacciu on the wall and take their weight in: 33 kg of oak for the years of Christ's life, 14 kg of chain for the fourteen stations of the Cross

Go under the archway of the town hall into Manichedda by the place du Maggiu, then down through Pietraggio to the échauguette on the place de Guardiola, the last surviving piece of the quarter's defences — on the way, look up at houses tied together by arcades and find a wall where the stone changes between the first floor and the second

Be on the place de a Porta before 21.30 on Good Friday night, when the door of Sainte-Marie opens and the procession comes out, and follow the 1,800 metres it takes about two hours to walk — the penitent has to fall three times, on the road to Sant'Anna, on the place de a Porta itself, and near the old chapel of Sainte-Lucie

Walk the Musée d'archéologie de la Corse from one end of its span to the other — the first peopling of the island nearly 10,000 years ago through to the end of the Genoese period in the 15th century — and give the statue-menhir room, the museum's own showpiece, the time it needs

Drive south onto the Cauria plateau, still inside this commune, and walk the three sites together: the dolmen of Fontanaccia, then the standing rows of I Stantari and Rinaiu — the alignments whose cousins you have just seen under glass in the museum

Walk out to the Genoese bridge of Spin'a Cavallu over the Rizzanese north of the town, and find the pair of menhirs beside it that the Corsicans call U Frati è a Sora, the friar and the sister

Prosper Mérimée called Sartène the most Corsican of Corsican towns, and the town has put the phrase on a sign at its entrance. Its history is of vendetta between families and of fights between quarters — the Borgu against Sant'Anna through the 19th century, the Rocca Serra against the Ortoli and the Pietri. Its square is overlooked by the old palace of the Genoese governors, now the town hall. On the night of Good Friday it holds the Catenacciu, the oldest procession in Corsica, going back to the 13th century: a penitent in red from head to foot, hooded so nobody can see his face, walks barefoot through the streets carrying a 33 kg oak cross and dragging a 14 kg chain tied to his right ankle, with a white penitent and eight black ones. Only the parish priest knows who he is, and nobody may do it twice. The cross and chain hang in the church of Sainte-Marie the rest of the year. The town also has the Musée d'archéologie de la Corse.

Sartène: The Most Corsican of Corsican Towns

Find the single way into the enclosure — a stairway cut straight into one of the granite boulders of the natural chaos, then a chicane that turns you sideways before you are inside — and notice that there is no second entrance

Walk the inside of the enclosure, 40 m by 20 and still 5 m high on average, and follow the passage along the wall — look for the stones left jutting out of the facing at about 2 m, which Grosjean read as the supports for a plank floor making a wall-walk

On the north-west side find the raised semi-circular terrace with the paving Grosjean read as hearths, then the three slab-roofed chambers built into the thickness of the wall with their unusually careful facing — and on the rock in front of the middle one, the cup cut into its centre

Go up to the torra that stands 10 m above the enclosure, in by the corridor on its east side with the niches cut in the sides, and look up: the semi-circular room, 3 to 4 m across, still carries its original corbelled vault, the only one left standing in Corsica

Carry on up to the Castellu di Capula at 759 m, built in the ninth century by one Bianco, count of Corsica, on Bronze and Iron Age foundations, and find the statue-menhir standing there again — it turned up as two fragments built into the reinforcement of the medieval staircase

Finish at the musée de l'Alta Rocca in Levie, where everything dug out of Cucuruzzu is kept, and find the obsidian arrowheads — obsidian is not Corsican rock, so somebody carried it across the sea

On a chaos of granite boulders at 700 m, commanding the northern end of the Levie plateau, stands the Castellu di Cucuruzzu, a classic fortified complex of the Torrean culture of the Corsican Bronze Age. Discovered in 1959 and dug by Roger Grosjean in 1963 and by François de Lanfranchi into the 1990s, it was lived in continuously from the Middle Bronze Age to the end of the third century BC. Its enclosure is 40 m by 20, built of blocks weighing up to a tonne and still standing an average of 5 m high, and on a raised terrace Grosjean found traces of hearths on a paved floor.

Cucuruzzu: A Bronze Age Castle in the Granite

Tour Su Nuraxi at Barumini, the nuraghe complex of about 1500 BC and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, and climb its central tower

Visit the Nuragic sanctuary of Santa Vittoria at Serri, the temple with its sacred well

Look for the Giara horses, the small wild cavallini, on the basalt plateau of the Giara di Gesturi

Su Nuraxi at Barumini is a nuraghe complex of about 1500 BC and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, its central tower still climbable above the village packed round its foot. Within a few kilometres are the nuragic sanctuary of Santa Vittoria at Serri, built round a sacred well, and the basalt plateau of the Giara di Gesturi, where the small wild cavallini run.

Su Nuraxi and the Giara: Sardinia's Nuragic Heartland

Taste aguardente de medronho at a distillery in Monchique, the firewater distilled from the fruit of the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo

Pick medronhos, the red fruits of the strawberry tree, in autumn when they ripen on the Monchique slopes, if in season

Eat presunto and smoked sausages, the cured meats of Monchique, with a glass of medronho in the mountain town

Learn about the traditional production of Medronho, the Algarve's famous firewater