Day 6 - Cinque Terre / Calanques (France)

General

The sixth day was the day the journey crossed a border. The morning was Italian and the evening was French, and the change between them was more than a matter of language: the coast, the light, the food and the architecture all shifted as the road went west along the Riviera towards Marseille and the limestone that stands at the end of it.

The drive from Liguria to Provence follows the coast for part of the way and then turns inland across the hills behind the French Riviera. The towns on the French side are larger and glossier than the Italian ones, the marinas are full of yachts, and the hills behind them are covered with the villas and the gardens of a century of winter visitors. The road then crosses towards Marseille, and the landscape changes again: the pines give way to the scrub of Provence, the hills become white with limestone, and the sea reappears in bays that are narrower and more enclosed than the ones left behind.

The destination was the coast east of Marseille, where the limestone of Provence meets the Mediterranean in a series of inlets that the French call calanques. The word is the Provençal one for a narrow, steep-walled inlet, and the places themselves are unlike anything on the Italian coast: high white cliffs, deep green water, narrow coves with beaches of white stone, and a vegetation of pines and scrub that smells of resin in the afternoon heat.

The evening was spent on the water at the mouth of one of the inlets, with the boats coming in and the climbers still visible on the walls above. The sea on this coast is a deeper blue than on the Italian side, the rocks are white rather than grey, and the whole scene has a severity that the Riviera of the brochures does not prepare a visitor for.

History

The two coasts of the day have different histories with a single thread. The Ligurian villages lived from Genoa and its trade, the Provençal ports lived from Marseille, and the two cities were rivals and partners for as long as there have been ships in the western Mediterranean. Marseille was founded by Greek settlers from Phocaea around 600 BC, it became the greatest port of Gaul under the Romans, and it has been the gate of the Rhone valley for two and a half thousand years.

Cassis, the town at the eastern end of the calanques, is older than the Roman province around it. Its site was occupied between 600 and 500 BC by the Ligures, who built a fortified dwelling on the height above the bay and lived by fishing, hunting and farming, and the town was later part of the Roman world and then of the county of Provence. Its economy was the sea, the salt, the fishing and, from the eighteenth century, the wine that is still made on the slopes behind it.

The calanques themselves were for most of their history a place of work rather than of leisure. The inlets were used by fishermen and by the small boats that carried goods along the coast, the limestone of the cliffs was quarried for building, and the tracks between the coves were the roads of the people who lived and worked there. The transformation of the coast into a place of walking, climbing and boating is a twentieth century development, and the national park that now protects it was established in 2012.

The border itself is a modern line in an old landscape. The county of Nice passed to France in 1860, the frontier between Italy and France was fixed along the ridges of the Alps, and the two coasts that the journey has followed have been exchanging people, goods and words for far longer than they have been separated by a customs post. The languages of the two sides, Ligurian and Provençal, are cousins, and the cooking of the coast from Genoa to Marseille is recognisably one tradition.

The trade of the two coasts has been connected by the sea for three thousand years and by the road for two hundred. The Romans built the via Aurelia along the Ligurian coast and continued it into Gaul, the medieval ports exchanged oil, wine, salt and fish along the same line, and the railway of the nineteenth century made the journey between Genoa and Marseille a matter of hours. The motorway that the day was driven on is the last of those links, and the traffic on it is the trade of the same coast carried in containers.

Geology

The limestone of Provence is the reason the coast looks as it does. It was laid down as the sediment of a warm shallow sea in the Cretaceous period, it was lifted by the collision of Africa and Europe, and it has been dissolved by rain and by groundwater ever since. The result is the landscape that geologists call karst: a country of dry valleys, sinkholes, caves and springs, in which water travels underground rather than on the surface.

A calanque is what happens when a karstic valley meets the sea. The valleys were cut into the limestone by rivers and by the dissolution of the rock when the sea level was lower than it is now, the ice age ended and the sea rose, and the lower parts of the valleys were drowned. What remains is a narrow inlet with steep walls and a floor of water, which is exactly what a calanque is, and the process is the same one that produced the rias of Brittany and the fjords of Norway in different rocks.

The cliffs above the water are the edges of that drowned landscape. The limestone is cut into vertical walls in places and into terraces in others, the rock is white in the sun and grey in the shade, and the pines and the scrub that grow in the cracks cover the slopes with a green that sets off the colour of the water. The coves at the head of the inlets have beaches of white pebbles and stones, and the water in them is turquoise over the pale bottom and dark blue where it deepens.

The karst is also a system of water. The rain that falls on the plateau disappears into the rock, travels through the fissures and the caves, and comes out at the springs and the submarine sources along the coast, which is why the water of one of the beaches near Cassis is noticeably colder than the rest of the sea. The same underground drainage is the reason the plateau above the cliffs is dry, and the reason the caves of the massif, including the one whose painted walls are famous, are reached through entrances that lie below the present sea level.

The wind of Provence is part of the geology of the day and part of its weather. The Mistral blows down the Rhone valley from the north, it arrives on this coast as a cold, dry gale that clears the sky and flattens the sea, and it is the reason the architecture of the Provençal towns has so few windows facing north. The walker who meets it on the plateau above the calanques will understand why the trees there grow leaning away from it and why the local advice is to walk with it rather than against it.

Things to See

The first evening on this coast is best spent in the town. Cassis has a harbour with a small fleet of fishing boats and a large one of pleasure craft, a beach, a market and a set of restaurants around the port that serve the fish of the day and the white wine of the slopes behind the town. The wine of Cassis is white and rosé, it has nothing to do with the blackcurrant liqueur that shares its name, and it is the correct drink for a plate of sea urchins or a bowl of the local fish soup.

The view from the town is the geological introduction to the next day. The massif of the calanques runs east from Marseille for about twenty kilometres along the coast with a width of about four, its highest point is Mont Puget at five hundred and sixty five metres, and its western part is built of the hard Urgonian limestone of the cliffs. The park that protects it covers five hundred and twenty square kilometres, of which only a sixth is land, and it includes the best known inlets: Sormiou, Morgiou, En-Vau, Sugiton and Port-Miou.

The practical arrangements for the area are worth setting out at the start. The roads into the massif are limited and closed to cars in the summer, the paths are the way in, and the walker needs water because the plateau is dry and the shade is scarce. The boat trips from the harbour of Cassis run along the inlets in the season and give the best view of the cliffs, and the combination of a boat in the morning and a walk in the afternoon is the standard programme of the place.

The evening light on this coast is the one that painters have been coming for. The limestone reflects the heat of the day, the sea holds a deep blue until the sun is low, and the whole massif turns pink and then grey as the light goes. The town, the harbour, the boats and the cliffs above them make a scene that has been painted, drawn and filmed for a hundred years, and it is best seen from the height above the town with a glass of the local wine in hand.

Anyone who arrives on the Italian side should expect the contrast to be sharp and pleasant. Italy gave the journey the terraces, the painted villages and the food of the sea; France gave it the white cliffs, the deep water and the dry smell of the pines. They are fifty kilometres apart and they look like two different countries, which is what they are, and the road between them is worth the day it takes.

The wine of Cassis deserves a paragraph of its own because it is older than the reputation of the place. The vineyards on the slopes behind the town were planted in the Middle Ages, the white wine was famous enough to be mentioned by the writers of the seventeenth century, and the appellation that protects it today is one of the oldest in Provence. It is dry, pale and drunk young, it goes with the fish and the sea urchins of the coast, and it is the correct answer to the question of what to drink in a harbour in Provence.

The road from Italy to this coast is worth a note for anyone following it. The crossing can be made on the motorway in a morning or on the coast road in a day, and the coast road is the one to take: it passes through the towns of the Riviera, crosses the border above Menton, and continues through Nice and Cannes to the calanques. The distance is short, the traffic in summer is not, and the journey is one of the classic drives of the Mediterranean.

References

1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Cinque Terre. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque%20Terre
2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Calanques National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calanques%20National%20Park
3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Massif des Calanques. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massif%20des%20Calanques
4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Cassis. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassis
5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Marseille. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseille
6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Mediterranean Sea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean%20Sea
7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Provence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provence
8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Gulf of Lion. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf%20of%20Lion
9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Liguria. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liguria
10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Genoa. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoa
11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). La Spezia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%20Spezia
12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ligurian Sea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligurian%20Sea
13. Brandolini P. (2017) The Outstanding Terraced Landscape of the Cinque Terre Coastal Slopes (Eastern Liguria). World Geomorphological Landscapes. 235-244. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26194-2_20
14. Blanc J.J., Monteau R. (1988) Le karst du massif des Calanques (Marseille -Cassis). Karstologia : revue de karstologie et de spéléologie physique. 11. 17-24. doi.org/10.3406/karst.1988.2186
15. Deboudt P. (2016) Le Parc national des Calanques (Marseille, Cassis, La Ciotat) : un exemple de gestion intégrée des zones côtières ?. Bulletin de l’Association de géographes français. 93. 369-386. doi.org/10.4000/bagf.950