“Red rocks, hello!” » When Mady Dalakupeyan answers the phone, the accent sings and the voice betrays the smoker. The owner of the hotel, the soul of a place which nevertheless does not lack it, stands behind the bar, a strategic location which also serves as a reception desk, between the percolator, the rows of glasses on stainless steel shelves, the walls covered with family photos, the reservation book filled out by hand, the locker for customer cards and passports. And the box containing the staff’s cell phones during service…
First up and last to bed, Mady Dalakupeyan has already, early in the morning, prepared the coffees, then cleared away breakfast. Later, in the afternoon, she will serve tea, bring the first aid kit to a client who fell during a hike, then it will be time to fill the ramekins with olives for the aperitif and light the lights. marsh rush street lamps. At sunset, before going to orchestrate the service in the room, she will also have taken out the lanterns in front of the Belle Epoque building, on the side of the immense terrace opening onto the spectacular scenery of the Gulf of Porto and the famous red rocks of Piana. Tortured shapes of pink granite, these calanche (“calanques”, in Corsica) have been listed as UNESCO World Heritage since March 1983.
With a lean silhouette and long jet-black hair, glasses with thick black frames and dark lipstick, Mady Dalakupeyan, 74, is of the working class. She grew up there, in this pretty village perched between Ajaccio and Calvi, where her mother ran a grocery store. “There were only three telephones in the village. One at the doctor’s, one at Roches Rouges and one at ours. When the hotel ran out of sugar or butter, it was my mother who was called and I who brought the groceries. But I didn’t enter the reception. I was 7 or 8 years old and sometimes, with my friends, we stood on the low wall to observe people coming and going. But we never went down. At the end of the 1950s, it was still a luxury hotel…”
Opened in 1912 under the leadership of Ajaccian Sylvestre Frassetto, promoter of the initiative unions which will work for the tourist development of the Isle of Beauty – an expression which appeared in the 19th century.e century -, the establishment was resold in 1925, then remodeled following its acquisition by Corsotel, a subsidiary of PLM (Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée). This company, which offered, in addition to the rail lines, a road route served by coach, also had stopover hotels close to picturesque natural sites.
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