On the morning of departure, Calenzana is still in shadow. It's 6:30am, the village sleeps, and the trail already opens onto a brutal slope covered in maquis. The GR20 makes no apologies. Within the first hour, the tone is set: this is not a hike, it's a test of character. The first switchbacks swallow 900 metres of elevation gain before the sun has even touched the ridge. In the pack, 11 kilos. In the legs, fifteen days ahead.
The northern section, from Calenzana to Vizzavona, is the most technical and the most savage of the two halves of the trail. The days string together in a mineral world of quiet violence. The Rinaghja plateau, the Bavella needles, the cabled passages of Bocca Minuta — each stage demands total presence. You cannot daydream on the GR20. The rock demands you look at it, read it, trust it.
"This trail doesn't ask you to be strong. It asks you to be here, entirely, at every step."
The southern section, from Vizzavona onward, changes face. Laricio pine forests replace the bare granite. The air fills with a warm, resinous scent. The pace slows, not out of ease, but because the body has learned to stop fighting the terrain — it composes with it. Lakes Bastani and Vitalaca, in a blue-green that seems unreal at 2,000 metres, are the silent rewards of this second week. You stop there a long while, for no particular reason, just to watch.
The GR20 refuges deserve their own chapter. Each evening, an unlikely community reforms around rough wooden tables — Italians, Germans, Spaniards, French — all reduced to the same state of happy exhaustion, all speaking the same language of shared effort. You swap tips about tomorrow's stage, tend to your blisters, eat too much pasta. It's rudimentary. It's perfect.
On the final morning, the descent toward Conca unfolds under an already-high sun. At a bend in the trail, the sea of Porto-Vecchio appears between two ridges, deep blue against a white sky. Fifteen days of mountain compress into that instant. The GR20 does not leave you unchanged — it gives you back to yourself, cleaned of everything that isn't essential.