A Photographer's travels through one of Southern France's best kept secrets

INSPIRATION | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

With its terracotta rooftops, pastel houses, narrow cobbled lanes and colorful boats, the small fishing village of Collioure is almost embarrassingly pretty, finds photographer Sam Parkes - as though everything has been crop-dusted in beauty and benevolence. He explores the lesser-known, but no less charming, seaside spot, tucked between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean.

BY SAM PARKES | CABANA TRAVEL | 25 JULY 2025

A small fishing village tucked between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, with its terracotta rooftops, pastel facades and narrow cobbled lanes, it's hard to believe that Collioure isn't just another playground for the jet-setting elite. One more sun-drenched spot along the well-worn coast of southern France. But unlike the Côte d’Azur, it's retained much of its humble origins as an anchovy fishing port.

I’d arrived early, having walked along the coastline from a nearby town. Aside from a yawning waiter lazily unstacking a Pisa of chairs, there was barely a soul to be seen. I stood for a few minutes on the harbour wall admiring the view, peering over the edge like a gargogyle - the water as clear as a halved marble, with a swirl of green. Nothing revives the spirit of the weary traveler like that first cold plunge, a bracing change of worlds.

Perhaps it was the sight of a windmill overlooking the harbour, but standing there, refreshed from my swim, I could imagine Don Quixote striding horse-back over the Pyrenees into Collioure. There was an unmistakably Spanish inflection to my brined vision. Red and yellow flags, street names in French and Catalan, and businesses with El and Las. It is, after all, only 15 miles to the Spanish border.

Certain places, like people, leave an impression disproportionate to the amount of time you spend with them. Half an hour in and I was considering signing up to the French Foreign Legion. It is almost embarrassingly pretty, as though everything has been crop-dusted in beauty and benevolence. A postcard cliche of Mediterranean good looks and charm. It seemed so obvious why some of the major artists of the 20th-century (Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Chagall) gravitated here. It was in Collioure that Fauvism took root, a movement characterised by luminous colors and pure, simplified forms. 

It is, sensorially speaking, pitch perfect for an artist: the light, the colors, the simple shapes, the ever present breeze; the solemn gong of a church bell, the gentle, rhythmic clucking of a few boats tethered beside their melting reflections; exaggerated underwater forms that only a pebble beach can evoke; the lingering seaside tang of cooked fish and baked bread. Castle, bell tower, windmill and fort. Red roofs, green hills, blue sea. Its beauty lies partly in its scale. It remains small, human. Sheltered but not cut off.

The natural harbour, sheltered by steep hills, made Collioure a strategic port from antiquity. By the 7th century, it was already a vital maritime centre. There is still a military presence in town with a nearby commando base. Wet-suited and tanned, like an Olympic swimming team, they’re often seen making relay swims across the harbour. Preparing, presumably, for an invasion of cravat-wearing Sunday painters, bearing water colours.

In the 12th century the Kings of Mallorca fortified the town, constructing the sublimely proportioned Château Royal. Sunlit, rhomboid and cubed, like a medieval Guggenheim- which, along with the Notre Dame des Anges Church, still dominates the sea front.

Accompanied only by the constant grinding and scraping of cicadas, passing nobody, a hot and tiring climb up the hill lead to a 16th century fort and an elevated view of the harbour: intersecting rooftops, brilliantly edged by olive groves and vineyards, curving around an infinity of sea and sky- red, green and blue- like a fauvist painting.