Corsica

Year-round service is close to entirely domestic French — Air Corsica keeps Calvi–Paris Orly running all year, but Calvi’s CDG link and the international routes across the island run roughly late June to mid-September. Flying in from outside France in May or October usually means connecting through Paris, Marseille or Nice.

If you are planning Corsica for the shoulder months, sort the flights before anything else — accommodation and ferries are the easy part.

All GR20 refuges and bivouac pitches are booked through one official portal, pnr-resa.corsica, run by the Corsican regional park — online only, and 2026 bookings opened on 20 January. There is no official sell-out statistic, but the small bottleneck refuges (Ortu di u Piobbu, Carrozzu, Usciolu) go first, and July–August itineraries are effectively fixed within weeks of the January opening. A commonly cited figure — with no official source behind it — is that around 40% of starters abandon.

Wild camping along the route is prohibited — the trail runs end-to-end through the regional park, and tents are allowed only on the paid bivouac areas beside the refuges, up in the evening and down in the morning. The booking covers the night alone: dinner, breakfast and packed lunches are ordered and paid with the warden on site (arrive before about 18:00, carry cash), and a reserved place is only guaranteed until 19:00.

The route itself: the northern half, Calenzana to Vizzavona, is markedly harder — steeper, rockier, more scrambling — and Vizzavona is the standard split point, with a railway station on the Ajaccio–Bastia line right by the trail, so a half-trek or a bail-out is a train ride, not a logistics problem. Since 2016 the trail no longer crosses the Cirque de la Solitude — after the 2015 accident it was permanently rerouted over the shoulder of Monte Cinto via Pointe des Éboulis, at 2,607 m now the highest point on the route; the old chained route is off the official trail and its fixed gear is no longer maintained.

Season and snow: the refuges are staffed roughly mid-May to early October (for 2026, 16 May – 4 October), and outside that window the route is a self-sufficient alpine undertaking, not a trek. The high northern cols hold snowfields into June — most years the route is passable without crampons from early-to-mid June, but in heavy-snow years people have needed them into late June; early-season hikers are advised to start from the south. Access: Calenzana is ~13 km from Calvi (a summer bus runs, taxis ~€30–50); at the southern end the long-running Conca shuttle is reported suspended for 2026, so budget around €55 for a shareable taxi to Porto-Vecchio.

The consequence shows up in every journey. We ran thirteen routes across the island on two open routing engines — OSRM and BRouter, free-flow — and not one averages better than 62 km/h; the more conservative engine puts the mountain crossings in the 30s. 130 km from Ajaccio to Bonifacio is somewhere between a two- and a three-hour drive.

Car-free works in two pockets, and mostly in July–August. The Balagne, where a local train runs Calvi to Île-Rousse five times a day — more in summer — calling at beach halts; and Porto-Vecchio, which has an airport shuttle from Figari plus summer buses to Palombaggia and Santa Giulia, July and August only. There is no railway at all south of Ajaccio.

Corsica restricts boats rather than people: navigation and mooring around the Îles Lavezzi are limited under a 2023 order running to 2028, and rules around the Scandola reserve are actively changing — check before booking a boat trip there. On land, the famous beaches fill their car parks by mid-morning in season; arrive early or come by the summer shuttle where one exists.

One safety note for families: the south-east (Palombaggia, Santa Giulia, Tamaricciu, Rondinara) shelves gently into sand, but the west and north-west coasts are pebbly and shelve steeply — the west-coast guides warn of undercurrents that pull swimmers off the shore at Portiglio and Baracci, and beaches near Porto can turn dangerous in wind.

By the time it reaches Corsica the Mistral arrives as a westerly anyway, and its real footprint is Cap Corse, the Balagne, the west coast and the Strait of Bonifacio. A Libeccio at Palombaggia is actively good — it blows offshore and flattens the water — though it will carry an inflatable out to sea.

The swap that matters: an easterly stirs Palombaggia’s seabed sand, costing the clarity you came for, and pushes jellyfish inshore — neighbouring Santa Giulia, which the same wind usually spares, is the right answer that day.

Santa Giulia divides people sharply. Sheltered and genuinely calm — which is why it is the right answer when the wind blows — but it draws more complaints than any other Corsican beach: banked posidonia, jet skis and parascending boats, one reviewer’s summary that "it looks like a water park, not a beach". The weed is luck; the boat traffic is not. Go early either way.

The Îles Lavezzi are the classic let-down. The boat trip out of Bonifacio is the island’s most-sold excursion, and in high season reviewers keep arriving at the same verdict — an uncountable number of boats in the bay, and an uninhabited island with no shops, no food, almost no shade. The fix people who enjoyed it give is the same every time: take the first boat around 09:00 and come back before midday.

The famous wild beaches are a project. Saleccia and Lotu in the Agriates are reachable only by boat, on foot, or down about 10 km of rough track covered at walking pace — and the boat is cancelled when it blows. Ostriconi is beautiful and notoriously dangerous to swim in rough seas, with currents that carry people offshore.

And dried seagrass on the sand is normal, not neglect — posidonia is protected and left in place deliberately.

Your hire car almost certainly cannot make the crossing. The ferries carry vehicles happily — the block is on the rental side: reading the terms of Europcar, Hertz, Sixt and Avis plus the local island firms, none permits it as a matter of course, and Europcar’s Italian ferry carve-out covers Italian islands only, which Corsica is not. Hire separately on each island, or get written authorisation before you board. Weighing the two islands against each other? See Corsica vs Sardinia, measured.