Bonifacio

People were in the area very early: the cave shelter of Araguina-Sennola just north of the town held the burial known as the Lady of Bonifacio, carbon-dated to about 6570 BC. The town that stands today was founded as a fortress in 828 by Boniface II of Tuscany, who had led a naval expedition against the Saracens and gave it his name; Il Torrione, a round tower, survives from the original citadel. Pisa and Genoa fought over this strategic port in the 12th century, and in 1195 Genoa took it for good, expelled all but thirty families and repopulated it with 400 families from Liguria, granting statutes that allowed the town to mint coins and produce salt.

As a Genoese stronghold Bonifacio withstood a five-month siege by Alfonso V of Aragon in 1420. Plague later devastated it, and in 1553, still weakened, it surrendered to the corsair Dragut acting with the French; it was rebuilt and returned to Genoa under the peace of 1559. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V stayed in the town in 1541, and Napoleon Bonaparte in 1793.

In 1855 the French frigate Sémillante was wrecked on the Lavezzi islands with the loss of hundreds of lives, and military cemeteries on the islands mark the disaster. The citadel served for many years as a base of the French Foreign Legion, which left for Nîmes in 1983. In 1993 France and Italy created the international marine park of the Strait of Bonifacio, which includes the Lavezzi islands.

Bonifacio's Genoese repopulation still shows in its speech. The town has its own dialect, Bonifacino, a form of Ligurian rather than Corsican, and the town's name in it is Bunifazziu. The old families' chapels in the marine cemetery of Saint-François and the tall houses of the upper town keep the feel of a Genoese colony on the edge of the sea.

Religious life is organised through five historic brotherhoods — of the Holy Cross, Saint John the Baptist, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Erasmus, the last for fishermen. Now lay associations, they remain very much alive, appearing at funerals and saints' processions, and above all during Holy Week, when they lead the Tenebrae services and processions through the old town. A procession is still held at the chapel of Saint-Roch, built where, by tradition, the last victim of the plague died.

The town has also found its way into literature: Guy de Maupassant set his short story "A Vendetta" in Bonifacio. Since 2025 the town has been twinned with Santa Teresa Gallura, its neighbour across the strait.

The commune had about 3,300 residents in 2023. It covers a much larger area than the town itself, including about 75 km of coastline and the Lavezzi islands, and it is the southernmost commune of metropolitan France — closer to the capitals of 20 other countries in Europe and Africa than to Paris.

Tourism drives the economy: the town is a popular summer destination, mostly for visitors from mainland France, and the port combines a marina, a small fishing port, boat-trip operators and ferry crossings several times a day to Santa Teresa Gallura in Sardinia. Fishing is restricted in the marine reserve around the islands. The hinterland, the Piali, was once important farmland, dotted with dry-stone huts called baracun.

Historically most residents lived in the upper town under the protection of the citadel, while the harbour quarter of La Marine stretches along the inlet and up the valley. Summer brings crowds to both, and in winter the town is quiet and many businesses close.

Bonifacio cooks as the rest of Corsica does, from the island's farms and its sea. Corsican charcuterie comes from pigs that live partly in the wild and feed mainly on chestnuts: lonzu, a peppered, salted and smoked pork fillet; coppa, also called capicollu; prisuttu, ham; and figatellu, a pork-liver sausage. Brocciu, a cheese made from milk and whey, mostly of sheep's milk, is used in cannelloni and ravioli and in fiadone, a cheesecake with lemon zest.

Chestnut flour, once the island's staple, is used in pulenda, a chestnut polenta, in cakes and fritters, and in Pietra, a Corsican beer brewed from malt and chestnut flour. Fish soup, made with sea or river fish, is typical of the island. Canistrelli are biscuits flavoured with white wine or anisette.

The restaurants of the harbour and the upper town serve these island dishes alongside seafood. Corsican wines from grapes such as Nielluccio, Sciaccarellu and Vermentinu, myrtle liqueur and the aperitif Cap Corse Mattei are the island's best-known drinks.