There's a stretch of the French coast where the sky is so blue it once made a painter change the course of art. Côte Vermeille - the "Ember Coast" - is a 30-kilometre belt between Argelès-sur-Mer and the Spanish border, where schist cliffs tumble into the sea and vineyards climb in terraces above the water.

It got its name in November 1912, by a vote of a Catalan tourist club - inspired by the redness of the local earth, the wine and the sunsets. But the bigger story is older. In May 1905, Henri Matisse arrived in the little town of Collioure and described it as a place with a "golden light that erased the shadows." André Derain joined him, and in three months the two of them created over 15 paintings and 40 watercolours.

When they exhibited them in Paris, one critic mockingly called them "fauves" - wild beasts. And so, out of an insult, Fauvism was born - one of the key modernist movements. Today the "Chemin du Fauvisme" trail shows reproductions at the very spots where the originals were painted. "There's no bluer sky in France than the one in Collioure," Matisse wrote. "It's enough for me to close the window shutters to have all the Mediterranean colours at home."

Every town along the coast carries its own secret. Banyuls-sur-Mer holds the oldest marine reserve in France and a winery housed in a 13th-century Dominican monastery. Port-Vendres turned a former dynamite factory into a botanical garden. Collioure keeps the grave of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who came to rest here in exile.

And above it all stands the wine - two appellations sharing the same terrain: Collioure, a dry red from grenache, syrah and mourvèdre, and Banyuls, a naturally sweet wine with notes of candied fruit, cocoa and dried figs. A Balkan person who thinks they've seen every beautiful Mediterranean coast might need to do one more reckoning. Some places aren't famous because they're perfect for a photo, but because they made someone see differently.