Residence Golf of Valinco - Filitosa

The prehistory of Corsica is very rich, one needs for proofs all the prehistoric sites which have been found in the daytime and which are even at the present.

Among one of the most known and of the richest in statues menhirs : Filitosa located in the Valinco Gulf.

It was Prosper Merimée who, in 1839, started the exploitation of the Filitosa site. The first man in Corsica is dated back to the 7th Century before J.C. The proximity of the fertile plain of the Taravo together with the presence of many rocky shelters made the site a perfect ground for human occupation, which lasted from the 5th Century to the first millenium before our era. The first inhabitants lived exclusively from fishing, fruit picking and hunting and they used tools made of wood or hard rock like silex or obsidian. The latter did not exist in Corsica so it had to be imported, which seems to prove that the Corsicans were already communicating with their Sardinian neighbours as it is believed that the obsidian rock actually comes from the Monte Arci in Sardinia. The stone carvers, the megalithic sculptors have made of Filitosa the largest Corsican and Mediteranean sculpture art centre.

At the start, the standing stone is a simple stone stood upright in the ground. Then the stone gets trimmed and the head appears. Then comes the transition between the standing stone and the statue-like standing stone where the body is separate from the head. Then the armed statues appeared but their meaning is still uncertain. The first hypothesis is that they represent the strength of the chiefs of ennemy clans who died on the battlefield to neutralise it, which could explain why a large number of those statues were distroyed by the 'Torre' to be used in the building of their cultural monuments. The second hypothesis is a representation of the brave warrior protecting the population against thiefs. The change from the unarmed statue to the armed one shows the adoption of weapons by the Filitosa inhabitants, weapons probably imported from Sardinia. This hypothesis brings no explanation about the destruction of those statue-like standing stones and their re-use in the central monument. Finally, the third hypothesis is a change of the cultural and religious beliefs and the will to get rid of the witnesses of their old faith by erecting large circular monuments, the torre. Thus Filitosa keeps selfishly its secrets