Calanches walks
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Paglia Orba

The rock formations visible from the road are not a patch on what you can see from the waymarked trails winding through the Calanches, which vary from easy ambles to strenuous stepped ascents. An excellent leaflet highlighting the pick of the routes is available free from tourist offices. Whichever one you choose, leave early in the morning or late in the afternoon to avoid the heat in summer, and take plenty of water.

The most popular walk is the one to the Château Fort (1hr), which begins at a sharp hairpin in the D81, 700m north of the Café Roches Rouges (look for the car park and signboard at the roadside). Passing the famous Tête de Chien, it snakes along a ridge lined by dramatic porphyry forms to a huge square chunk of granite resembling a ruined castle. Just before reaching it there's an open platform from where the views of the gulf and Paglia Orba, Corsica's third highest mountain, are superb – one of the best sunset spots on the island, but bring a torch to help find the path back.

For a more challenging extension to the above walk, begin instead at the Roches Rouges café. On the opposite side of the road, two paths strike up the hill: follow the one on your left nearest the stream (as you face away from the café), which zigzags steeply up the rocks, over a pass and down the other side to rejoin the D81 in around 1hr 15min. A hundred and fifty metres west of the spot where you meet the road is the trailhead for the Château Fort walk, with more superb views.

A small Oratory niche in the cliff by the roadside, 500m south of Café Roches Rouges, contains a Madonna statue, Santa Maria, from where the wonderful sentier muletier (1hr) climbs into the rocks above. Before the road was blasted through the Calanches in 1850, this old paved path, an extraordinary feat of workmanship supported in places by dry-stone banks and walls, formed the main artery between the villages of Piana and Ota. After a very steep start, the route contours through the rocks and pine woods above the restored mill at Pont de Gavallaghiu, emerging after one hour back on the D81, roughly 1.5km south of the starting point. Return by the same path.

Capo d'Orto

From Porto, you have to crane your neck to see the tooth-shaped escarpments of Capo d'Orto (1294m), Corsica's most imposing coastal peak, which looms above the head of the Spelunca Valley. Its north and west faces, and those of the massif's subsiduary summits – Capo Vittellu and the Tre Signore – still harbour unexplored rock walls up which new climbing routes are opened every year. But the approach from the more gently shelving western side is a popular forest walk via an old paved mule track, with a final section following cairns over exposed rock. The main incentive to do it are the vast panoramic views from the summit, which even by Corsican standards are extraordinary, taking in the entire gulf and central watershed.

The route is covered on the tourist office's free map; otherwise try to get hold of IGN #4150 OT. Don't rely on the water sources marked on either, which can dry up in summer; and bring at least three litres per person in warm weather. Highly exposed and largely treeless, the summit of Capo d'Orto is no place to be in a storm; even a light rainfall can render the easy scramble to the top tricky in places. In dry conditions, however, the route offers no technical obstacles.

The round trip from Piana takes about five hours. You can save yourself a dull thirty-minute plod at the start by driving or hitching 1.5km east along the D81: just after the sharp bend at the Pont de Mezzanu, look for a stony piste cutting off the road to the right, where you can park. Following the track along, you'll then arrive at a football pitch; walk diagonally across it to a little footbridge, on the far side of which you should turn right, as shown by a signpost. From here a well-worn sentier muletier presses east up the right bank of a stream under a dense cover of pine trees. After 45 minutes, it starts to zigzag more steeply northeast up a side valley, reaching a low saddle pass, Bocca di Piazza Monica (910m), where you meet another path (from the Roches Rouges café in the Calanches). Head right at this first junction and keep following the Orange waymarks east around the line of the hill until you arrive at another signpost pointing the route left, over bare rock, towards the summit, visible shortly after. From the hollow on the far side of the pass, a long sequence of cairns threads a steepening route through the rocks to the top, reached after 3hr 15min from the car park. Allow 1hr 30min–2hr for the descent by the same route.