Cassis, Bouches-du-Rhône

Where it sits. Cassis is a fishing port of around 7,000 people 20 kilometres east of Marseille, wedged between two extraordinary pieces of geology. West of the town, the limestone coast breaks into the calanques — narrow drowned valleys with vertical white walls and turquoise water at the bottom. East of it rises Cap Canaille, a wall of ochre and red conglomerate reaching 394 metres straight out of the sea, among the highest maritime cliffs in France, crossed by the Route des Crêtes towards La Ciotat. The harbour itself is small, ringed with pastel houses and a working fleet, and overlooked by a fourteenth-century castle on its own rock, privately owned and not open to the public.

Stone, wine and water. Cassis made its money for centuries from quarrying rather than tourism. Its hard white limestone, cassien, was shipped out for the docks and quays of Marseille, Algiers, Alexandria and Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal, and you can still see the cut faces above Port-Miou. The other export is wine: the Cassis appellation, granted in 1936 among the very first in France, covers a small amphitheatre of terraces beneath Cap Canaille and produces mostly whites from marsanne, clairette and ugni blanc, dry and saline, drunk locally with sea urchins and bouillabaisse and rarely seen far from the town. Frédéric Mistral's Provençal boast — that a man who has seen Paris but not Cassis has seen nothing — is quoted on half the menus.

Painters and cinema. Cassis drew the Fauves before the Riviera did: André Derain worked here in 1907, Georges Braque in 1907 too, and Raoul Dufy repeatedly, all attracted by the collision of white rock, red cliff and blue water. Winston Churchill set up an easel here in the 1920s. The town's place in film history is oblique but genuine, and it belongs to the coast rather than the streets. Eight kilometres east along the Route des Crêtes lies La Ciotat, where the Lumière brothers filmed L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1895 — the fifty seconds of a train pulling into the local station that became the founding legend of the moving image — and where the Eden Théâtre, opened in 1889 and restored and reopened in 2013, is the oldest surviving purpose-built cinema in the world. Marcel Pagnol, whose novels and films defined Provence for generations of viewers, was born at Aubagne 20 kilometres inland and filmed his own hills at La Treille rather than on this coast, a distinction worth keeping straight. The calanques themselves have been used for decades by underwater and documentary filmmakers, for the simple reason that the water is deep, clear and vertical-walled within metres of the shore.

The Calanques. The Parc national des Calanques was created in April 2012, the first national park in Europe to cover a city's doorstep and to combine land and sea in one protected area. Three calanques are walkable from Cassis: Port-Miou, a long narrow inlet used as a mooring; Port-Pin, with a small pine-shaded beach about 45 minutes on foot; and En-Vau, the spectacular one, a slot of white cliff with a pebble beach, roughly two hours out on a rough, exposed path with a steep final descent. Boats run from the harbour on circuits of three, five, eight or nine calanques with no landing. In 1985 the diver Henri Cosquer found a cave mouth 37 metres underwater near the Calanque de la Triperie whose interior holds painted and engraved images of horses, bison and auks made when the sea was far lower; the original is sealed, and a full-scale replica opened in Marseille in 2022.

In the town itself. The port is the centre of everything: a horseshoe of quays where the fishing boats still land at dawn on the Quai des Baux, with restaurant terraces occupying the rest. Behind it the old streets climb in a tight grid to the church of Saint-Michel and a handful of small squares with plane trees and boules pitches. The town beach, the Plage de la Grande Mer, is shingle and small; the Plage du Bestouan on the western side is quieter and clearer. Wine estates on the terraces above — Clos Sainte-Magdeleine on its own promontory, Domaine du Paternel and others — receive visitors for tastings, and several can be reached on foot from the town in half an hour.

Getting there and timing. Trains from Marseille reach Cassis station, which is three kilometres uphill from the town with a connecting shuttle bus. Driving in summer is discouraging: the town's car parks fill early and the Route des Crêtes is closed on days of high fire risk, as are the calanque footpaths, which are frequently shut between June and September and sometimes only open before 11 in the morning. Check the daily access map before setting out — the closures are enforced and the fines are real. Carry water, since there is none on the paths, and wear proper shoes; the limestone is polished slick by boots. Late spring and September give warm water, open paths and a town that is still recognisably a port rather than a car park.