THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND
Cavallo, a small, kilometer square stone lost down near the extreme south of Corsica, is one of the most secret jewels of the Mediterranean. From Jean Castel to Bill Gates, via Victor-emmanuel of Savoy or the Italian mafia, its story has been a true romantic journey for the last fifty years.
Everything begins one morning in 1966.
Jean Castel, the king of Parisian nightlife and his fisherman friend embark on a boat to visit the Lavezzi Islands, an archipelago of 23 islands lost between Corsica and Sardinia. Seduced by the few heavenly pebbles thrown on the blue backgrounds of the Mediterranean, he immediately decided to buy Cavallo, the largest of the islands, for two or three million francs, and offers the rest to the town hall of Bonifacio. In return, he obtained permission to build his new kingdom on the still virgin, 112 hectares.
His idea? To make Cavallo a kind of summer extension of his club on rue Princesse where, since the end of the 50s, he hosted popular artists and celebrities out on a spree: Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey,
Françoise Sagan, the Beatles or the Stones when they are passing through Paris, as well as girls from Catherine Harlé’s model agency - Nico, Anita Pallenberg, Amanda Lear,
Anna Karina - and those from Madame Claude’s, who are sometimes the same.
His project is in tune with the times. “Somewhere between hippie utopia and jet-set community”, says journalist Delphine Leoni. He builds stone sheep barns with roofs made of cedar tiles. There is no electricity. The water is brought by boat with a little to eat and a lot to drink. Castel has convinced his friends to join him and to build a house in his new Garden of Eden. He is planning about fifty mansions. As well as a hotel, the Hotel des Pêcheurs, which is still the only one on the island today.
Promised land
Victor-emmanuel de Savoie is one of the first to sign. As heir to the throne of Italy, he is banned from entering the country by the Italian Republic. But Cavil is a few miles from Sardinia where the aristocracy and the upper middle class of the Alps have gotten used to coming since the war. With his wife Marina Ricolfi Doria, a water skiing champion from the Swiss Italian bourgeoisie, they are building a 600m2 plus, troglodyte house, where their son Emmanuel-philibert of Savoy and his wife, the French actress Clothilde Courau, still frequent.
Another iconic couple from Cavallo, Catherine Deneuve and Marcello
Mastroianni. One can also cross paths with Brigitte Bardot, Mick and Bianca Jagger…
“A few cabins, beauties in bikini, dom perignon and lobsters grilled by local fishermen, as Sophie des Deserts wrote in L’obs. And then, soon after an airstrip, beautifully built bungalows in the rock, a small hotel… ‘The Castel finishing school’, exclaimed Caroline of Monaco.” The princess, who had met her first husband, Philippe Junot, well you guessed it, at Castel’s, still owns a house in Cavallo.
The hotel des Pêcheurs bears witness to this time. It is a set of small houses facing the sea. Some say the style is very Italian, others say somewhat cheesy. They do not necessarily go for the cooking; but for the view! The bungalows with terrace overlook an incredible beach of white sand protected by surreal and majestic rocks, polished by the wind, that could be seen in the comedy Think Again (2007) with François Cluzet and Alice Taglioni. This hotel features a spa, a swimming pool and tennis courts. But apart from that, there’s no luxury boutiques or trendy bars: Cavallo is the anti-porto Cervo, the Sardinian resort on the other side of the strait. The island is resolutely reserved for lovers of tranquility and nature, featuring only one supermarket and one restaurant.
Italian mafia
One evening, in the summer of 1978, Victor-emmanuel de Savoie could not find his rubber boat to join his yacht. Furious, he begins to shoot in the air. Unfortunately, the shots are fatal. An 18-year-old, asleep on the deck of a nearby boat is killed. While the prince was never sentenced, his reputation and that of the island were sullied.
The hippie dream was over. The economic crisis broke out. Many of those who had promised to buy houses on the island cancelled, and Jean Castel, who was always more of a festive man than a businessman, went bankrupt. “I was a guy like Bernard Tapie. I took care of companies in difficulty with the difference: they were mine”, he confessed later.
He sold to Italians, who were discovered to be nominees for the mafia. In the 80s,
Lillo Lauricella became the strongman on the island. He built a failed residence and started building pink colonnade houses for rich Transalpines. Some remain unfinished. And for good reason: these real estate operations were probably intended to launder money from the Sicilian and Roman mafia. Lauricella was murdered with twelve bullets in 2002 in Caracas.
To complete the picture, the separatists have gotten involved, getting excited when they saw this little piece of Corsica banned from their compatriots. At first, it seemed that the Italians paid the revolutionary tax to have peace. But in the 90s, things went bad and several villas were bombed. Today, the fight is more political… In 2015, Gilles Simeoni came to the island a few months before being elected president of the Executive Council of Corsica. He wants the island to be accessible to all, or at least its beaches, as required by law. And that boats can find shelter in the creeks when the wind blows. Because sometimes it happens that this little harbor is shaken by thunderous winds!
A preserved paradise
This jostled story does not only have disadvantages. Nowhere else can one find such pristine beaches. “Reserved for a handful of privileged people at the height of the season, the island does not accommodate more than 1200 residents and seems relatively preserved, explains Delphine Leoni. Apart from the fishing village, the domain of the Gods, Cavallo has 78 houses: improved bungalows, sheep barn style or villas that, with a few exceptions, reflect an integration problem.” So much so that the happy few who stay there are reluctant to publicize this idyllic destination. “Cavallo is really a trip”, says photographer Gilles Petipas, who discovered the island at a start-up seminar at the Hotel des Pêcheurs. “You arrive in a port that seems abandoned, and they pick you up in a golf cart just like in the series Fantasy Island. The shacks are covered with vegetation, stashed behind thorny bushes, it feels like Ibiza. In the evening, the mist thickens, we bathe in the hot water between the rocks and have the impression of being in Iceland. And when we take a boat to Lavezzi, there are so many fish in the clear water that we can imagine ourselves in the Seychelles.” Despite all his adventures, Cavallo still convinces the jet set. Both Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich own or have owned houses there. Here, we come up against a certain culture of secrecy. As confirmed by a Parisian musician who owns a sheepfold where he receives the French touch, but who does not want to talk about it “because, firstly, it’s Corsica and because I do not want to see a bunch of assholes that you can see elsewhere”. An absurd demonstration that it is urgent to discover Cavallo.