There is a 30-kilometre stretch of the French Mediterranean coast, painted red - not in a metaphorical sense, but literally. The earth is red. The wine is red. In the early evening, the sun before it sets paints the cliffs and the little houses in a colour that the French tourism club in 1912 named Côte Vermeille - "Vermilion Coast". The name was officially adopted on 5 November of that same year. Before that, nobody thought of it as anything special.

Tucked between the Spanish border and Perpignan, this stretch of the Mediterranean stayed off the major tourist roads. In the north is Argelès-sur-Mer with a 7-kilometre beach, in the south Cerbère, which borders Spain. Between them - Collioure, the small harbour where Henri Matisse, André Derain and Paul Signac came at the start of the 20th century and invented an entire art movement. "There is no sky in France bluer than the one over Collioure," Matisse wrote.

Collioure is the heart of the trip. The 7th-century castle, an old Templar fortress, the "Notre-Dame des Anges" church whose bell tower is in fact an old maritime lighthouse. Twice a week there's a market selling fish tins from Banyuls - anchovies in olive oil, sardines. These workshops have existed here since the time fisherman came back from the nets and didn't know what else to do with the catch.

Banyuls-sur-Mer, a few kilometres south, gave the world the dessert wine "Banyuls" - a naturally sweet wine with 14% alcohol, aged in oak barrels in the open sun. That process is only made possible by the Côte Vermeille climate. The vineyards here cut into terraced stone walls - 6,000 kilometres of walls in total, built by hand over the last eight centuries. UNESCO has had them on its World Heritage list since 2015.

What to expect? Coves tucked between cliffs where you'll be alone even in August. Villages of 200 residents where every day you have breakfast on the terrace of the same bar (there isn't another). Wineries where the owner personally pours four or five wines for two euros. Workshop-museums where ceramics are still made. The Museum of Modern Art in Collioure with permanent shows of Matisse, Derain, Picasso. And, if you're lucky with the season (May to September), a pack of fishermen arguing over the price of anchovies on the harbour - a scene you can only see on the Balkans in a Kusturica film.