Calanque d'En-Vau

En-Vau is one of the calanques between Marseille and Cassis, a narrow inlet cut into white limestone with a small pebble beach at its head. It sits inside the Calanques National Park, created in 2012 and the only park in Europe covering land, sea and a periurban area at once.

It is the calanque most often photographed, and the reason is proportion: the inlet is narrow, the walls are close to two hundred metres, and the beach at the end is small enough that the scale reads immediately. The rock is Urgonian limestone, the same formation that produces the whole coast, and the fissures in it made these inlets long before the sea rose to fill them.

The beach is white pebble, steep, perhaps eighty metres across. The water is deep, clear and cold, with no shallows to speak of. There is no shade after the middle of the day and no fresh water. Climbers work the walls above, which is a separate use of the same place and has been going on here for a century. Port-Pin and Port-Miou lie between here and Cassis on the same coastal path, which makes a three-calanque walk the standard way of seeing them; En-Vau is the furthest and the one people turn back before reaching.

There is nothing built. Access is on foot — around ninety minutes from the Col de la Gardiole car park over rough limestone, with a steep final descent — or by kayak or boat from Cassis. In summer the park restricts access on high fire-risk days, closing the massif entirely, and those closures are decided each morning.

A rock corridor with water in it, at the end of a hot unshaded walk that the prefecture closes on fire-risk days. Take two litres a person and check the massif's status the morning you go — the closure is announced daily and is not advisory.