Golden sandy beaches are not exactly what Iceland is famed for and, even if it were, with average summer temperatures around 10 to 13 degrees, the beach isn't usually high on many visitors' list of priorities! However, in typically unique Icelandic fashion, just 10-minutes' drive from Reykjavik centre you'll find Nautholsvik Geothermal Beach - a man-made stretch of golden sand…
We’ve wanted to visit Corsica for a few years now - its mixture of amazing beaches, Mediterranean weather and dramatic mountains are all the kinds of things we love, but we’d not been able to find flights before that were cheap enough or at the right times for us. This year, we found some surprisingly cheap flights with Air Corsica…
We’ve created this photo gallery from some of our Corsica holiday photos, from both the Porto Vecchio region in the south to the Ajaccio area in the west, to show you what it’s like here and hopefully provide some inspiration for you on places to visit and things to do if you’re considering a family holiday to Corsica. Click a…
Every night in Porticcio, after finishing dinner at the beach-front restaurants, we’d watch the sun set over the other side of the Gulf of Ajaccio, behind the Sanguinaire Islands. Earlier in the week, we’d briefly visited the beach at Capo di Feno - a large beach out in the countryside about 30-minutes’ drive from Ajaccio centre, which faces directly west…
All around Ajaccio and Porticcio are locations for booking boat trips to various sites up and down the western coast of Corsica, most of them consisting of visits to the Isles Sanguinaires, Calanches de Piana, Bonifacio, Girolata and the Scandola nature reserve. [caption id="attachment_868" align="aligncenter" width="800"] One of the ‘Nave Va’ tour boats that operate from Porticcio and Ajaccio[/caption] There’s…
After several days at different beaches, we were looking for something a bit different to do and found the Pointe de la Parata - an area about 35 minutes’ drive from Ajaccio where the mainland of western Corsica ends and turns in to the ‘Isles Sanguinaires’ - a string of small, remote islands with rocky coastlines, lighthouses and watchtowers... The…
We picked up a leaflet in Porticcio for the Agosta Fun Beach, which is a location for watersports activities like jet ski hire, parasailing, banana boats, etc about 10-minutes up the road from Porticcio centre. On arrival at Agosta Beach, we were surprised at how empty it was, especially considering this was the middle of peak season and all the…
The town of Ajaccio (pronounced Ah-jax-io) is the capital of Corsica. It’s a large town by the standards of the rest of Corsica, but still small enough to easily explore on foot or by the small ‘land train’ that tours around each day. We parked up in an underground multi-storey car park and headed first for the port area, which…
For our week spent near Ajaccio in Corsica, we chose a villa in the small town of Porticcio, which is about 15-minutes’ drive from Ajaccio centre itself. Porticcio is a popular holiday destination with numerous hotels, ‘residences’ - and a brilliant beach which is lined with a load of restaurants and bars with all their seating directly on the beachfront.…
Bonifacio is one of Corsica's main landmark attractions - a seaside town with a glamorous marina and landmark 'old town' high up on the cliff face overlooking the sea with the neighbouring island of Sardinia clearly visible beyond. It's within driving distance of where we stayed near Porto Vecchio but we split the journey up, spending half the day on…
The most famous beach in Corsica is Palombaggia, on the outskirts of the town of Porto Vecchio. It’s famed for its soft white sands and crystal clear water - and is a long, 2km stretch of sand lined with ‘umbrella’ pine trees. We’d visited nearby Santa Giulia beach earlier in the week and had been completely blown away by the…
The Col de Bavella is a famous mountain road leading from Corsica’s South East coast, high up in to the Alta Rocca mountain range. Looking for a different type of day out from the previous ones lounging on beaches and by the pool, we decided to take the car up the Col de Bavella, stopping off at the amazing Cascades…
This South-East part of Corsica’s coast is dotted with countless beaches - but the two main ‘destination’ beaches in the region are Palombaggia and Santa Giulia, both within a few miles of each other and both famed for their almost Caribbean-style white sand and clear blue waters. We turned up a bit late in the day to Santa Giulia, to…
For our first week in Corsica we stayed about 20-minutes outside the town of Porto Vecchio... Accommodation in the actual town itself is reserved pretty much for the rich - it’s an exclusive, up-market resort with super-yachts frequenting its glittering marina - but we were able to stay more cheaply on the outskirts of the town and could easily drive…
Another of the most beautiful beaches near Porto Vecchio, on Corsica’s South-East coast, is in the bay of Rondinara, which is between the towns of Porto Vecchio and Bonifacio. The Rondinara bay is an almost perfectly circular cove lined with picturesque hillsides, down which a narrow road snakes from the top to a large car park a few hundred metres…
*** Update July 2019: We understand that Cae Du campsite in Beddgelert has closed down and will not re-open unless new owners are found to take it over. we seriously hope this happens because, as you’ll see from the below review, it’s a brilliant site. Note that this refers to Cae Du campsite in Beddgelert and not the campsite of…
We spent a week in August staying in this small town in south-eastern France, not by deliberate choice but because one of the only remaining available holiday villas we could find happened to be here. We had driven here from home in Southampton, spending the first week of our holiday in the west of the region and then driving here…
One of the advantages of where we stayed in the South of France (Saint Cezaire Sur Siagne near Grasse) was its almost perfect position for visiting the glamourous resorts of the Cote d’Azure but without having to pay the price of actually staying in those resorts. Our villa was about 45-minutes’ drive from the centre of Cannes, so we headed…
There aren’t many places in the world like Monaco, It’s a unique destination and, much like Cannes, is a place you probably either visit because you’re a billionaire with a mega yacht, or because you’re basically going to stare in amazement at those billionaires and their mega yachts! We were staying near Grasse, which was about an hour’s drive from…
We booked this villa for the second week of our fortnight trip to the South of France after finding it available at the last minute on the Homeaway website. The pictures on the website were a bit grainy and, coupled with the fact it was still available when so many other villas in the region were already booked, this made…
