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 is used by a mixture of private boats, fishing vessels and multiple large cruise ships which come in and out every day, depositing their passengers for day-trips around the city.
There’s a small market down by the port along with various vendors selling boat trips and other activities. You can catch a ferry over to the other side of the bay to Porticcio from here too
Further along, past the military ‘citadel’ is a beach, which is popular with people staying in Ajaccio town itself – but not the best beach option in the region if you have transport to go a bit further afield.
Most of the sights around Ajaccio town itself are related to history, as this is the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte – something which is a big deal to the town and to which there are various museums and landmarks dedicated.
Spending time looking around museums and at statues and historical houses in the 35-degree Mediterranean sunshine wasn’t exactly very appealing to any of us, so we didn’t spend too much time looking around Ajaccio town itself.
Maybe we missed stuff which was more fun and entertaining but we didn’t find too much in Ajaccio town itself to occupy a family of children – there’s far more for that outside the main town itself.
The midday heat was actually a bit too hot to bear spending much time at all looking around the town – ideally if you’re heading here we’d recommend doing so later in the evening after it’s cooled down a bit.
There’s no doubt the region surrounding Ajaccio is a superb destination for a holiday and very, very well worth visiting – but for a family holiday activity, a visit to the town centre itself probably isn’t going to go down particularly memorably.
We found a restaurant down one of the little side streets where we sat for lunch before heading back to the refreshing pool of the villa for the rest of the afternoon.
