Forêt d'Aïtone
France > Corsica > Porto > Foret d'Aiatone

Laricio Pines

Thousands of soaring Laricio pines, some of them as much as 50m tall, make up the Forêt d'Aïtone, just a few kilometres east of Évisa. The most beautiful forest in Corsica, it extends over ten square kilometres between Évisa and the Col de Verghio (1477m), the highest point in Corsica traversable by road. Well-worn tourist paths cross the forest at various points, but local wildlife still thrives here.

Some of the oldest pines in the forest are approaching five hundred years old. Fine-grained, strong and very resistant to weathering, the Laricio was highly valued by the Genoese for ships' masts and furniture, and it was they who first built a road down the valley to the coast, later upgraded by the French using convict labour. Throughout the nineteenth century, forests all over Corsica were regularly decimated, as the island has the very best specimens of this species, which only grows in forests higher than 1000m. When the British artist and poet Edward Lear came here in the 1860s, he noted with regret "the ravages of [the] hatchets: here and there on the hillside are pale patches of cleared ground, with piles of cut and barked pines … everywhere giant trees lie prostrate".

One of the most popular short walks goes to the Belvédère, a great natural balcony giving magnificent views across the copper-tinted rocks of the Spelunca gorge. To reach it, look for the wide lay-by on the left-hand side of the road, 5km northeast of Evisa. A signpost pointing left indicates the well-trodden route through the forest. Following the unsurfaced forest track that peels left a little further up the main road, you can also drop down to the piscine naturelle d'Aïtone, one of the more accessible bathing spots in the forest, where the river crashes through a series of idyllic pools and falls.