On the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, masked separatist militants have been targeting luxury vacation properties with explosives and arson — yet the threat has done little to cool demand from wealthy buyers eager to own a piece of the island.
The most alarming wave came in October 2023, when 34 homes in 20 different towns were reportedly bombed or set on fire during one unsettling overnight series of attacks.
Corsica’s armed pro-independence movement, which does not appear to have caused any deaths in the attacks, has continued to focus on second homes — many of them empty holiday residences owned by people from mainland France or foreign investors. As recently as March 2026, another property was blown up, according to the New York Times.
The National Liberation Front of Corsica, the paramilitary arm of a separatist campaign that has existed for roughly half a century, has made its message clear: it wants non-Corsican property owners to leave the island.
That warning was delivered openly last month, when about 15 masked and armed members of the group staged a press conference and told tourists and prospective second-home buyers to keep away from Corsica.
“Until our national rights are recognized and respected, we have only one message to send them,” one member read from a prepared statement. “Stay home. And, if that’s not the case, do not consider yourself safe on our national territory.”
The threats have not slowed the market. Second homes now account for 37% of Corsica’s housing stock, and as much as 50% in some coastal towns, according to a 2026 report from the Corsican Assembly.
Only about 61 Americans live on the island full time, according to a 2020 report from the Local, making it the least popular region in France for US expats, largely due to its lack of a major city and pricier travel links to the mainland.
Politically, the bombing campaign has paid off. The French Senate votes next month on a constitutional amendment recognizing Corsica’s distinct language — far more similar to Italian than French — culture and history, and granting its local government new authority over zoning and waste management. It would be the first time any French region received that status.
“It was a tactical success,” André Fazi, a political scientist at the University of Corsica, referring to the bombings, told The Times.
Still, the amendment stops short of giving Corsicans control over who can buy property there, the central demand of hardline separatists. Petru Antone Tomasi, a spokesman for the independence party Nazione, which opposes the amendment as a diluted compromise, said the land fight cannot be separated from the broader independence push.
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“We consider the fight for the land intertwined with the struggle for Corsica,” Tomasi told the outlet.
The Liberation Front has claimed responsibility for thousands of attacks since forming in 1976, including a 1991 operation that hit more than 80 vacation homes and a 2012 incident in which masked gunmen dragged a Parisian financier and six others from his villa before blowing it up.
Fifteen homes have been burned or bombed since 2024 alone. A Paris counterterrorism investigation into the 2023 attacks has led to 10 arrests, and prosecutors have opened a separate probe into last month’s press conference.
Buyers keep coming regardless. Madeleine Michaud, a 65 year old retiree from Lyon, paid 2.5 million euros for a home in southern Corsica, including 150,000 euros for a retractable glass wall overlooking the sea. She noticed nationalist tattoos on some of her construction workers but said her ties to local friends make her feel protected, though she asked to be identified only by her middle and maiden names as a precaution.
“They don’t care about me,” she told The Times.
Real estate agent Irène Valentin said she regularly hears from anxious prospective buyers.
“Some of them are very afraid,” she said. “They know somebody who had a house in the village and the house was burned. They want to come here and they want to be reassured.”
Not every buyer takes the threat seriously, she added.
“They can be very arrogant,” Valentin said. “I say to myself, if they behave that way here, they’ll get their house burned.”
Mona Wingate, whose family bought a Corsican olive mill in 1975 amid an earlier wave of bomb threats, moved back to the property in 2019 and has taken the opposite approach, opening her land to locals and attending village events.
“It’s their land and they had access to it for hundreds of years,” she said.
So far, she said, she has had no problems.