Craggy, arid, isolated, and dramatically beautiful, Folegandros is one of the most remore islands in the Cyclades. Will the arrival of a new, five-star resort tip the balance and change the traditional character of the island, or can Folegandros become a model for more sustainable tourism developments?
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Sea and Stone
In a quiet corner of mainland Greece, a glamorous new resort offers access to extraordinary treasures, both natural and archaeological.
Deep in the southwestern Peloponnese, Greece’s first Mandarin Oriental hotel offers hospitality of the highest calibre, and access to some of the country’s most stunning beaches and mind-blowing ancient ruins.
Postcard from Syros
Kaikia, the small, traditional wooden boats found in the Ionian and Aegean, are usually built without plans by the boatbuilder’s memory alone. Designed as fishing boats, tenders or to transport goods, livestock and people, long before there were any roads or ferries, these boats were built to last. They are part of the postcard view of any Greek island port, and yet they are becoming scarcer — during the past 30 years, almost 14,000 have been destroyed under an EU directive designed to prevent overfishing. As well as giving up their fishing licence, fishermen must scrap their vessel to qualify for a generous subsidy.
Only twenty traditional boatbuilders remain in Greece – six of them on Syros, an island with a long and illustrious shipping history. Here, a handful of shipwrights continue to practise their craft — stubbornly, patiently, lovingly sanding decks, caulking hulls, occasionally even coaxing planks into frames. And you can take a gentle cruise around the island on one such boat, the beautifully restoed Kallia M.
Arcadian Bliss
Nymphs, dryads and demi-gods are part of everyday discourse in Arcadia. The mythical domain of Pan – the goat-legged god of forests and flocks, shepherds and spontaneous revelry – the region has been romanticised by everyone from Virgil to Goethe, Poussin and even Demis Roussos. Through the ages, the Arcadian ideal has come to represent a pastoral paradise unspoilt by human civilisation. Unlike so many mythical Greek locales (see: Thebes, Sparta, Eleusis) that are virtually impossible to reconcile with their modern incarnations, Arcadia still feels like a place where man lives simply, in harmony with nature.
Now, there’s a new hotel in this sylvan wilderness that feels both timeless and contemporary.
Manna Arcadia is as unexpected and gratifying as its name suggests.
No supermarkets, no sunbeds: Santorini’s wild neighbour
Surprisingly, after a hiatus of some 25 years, I found the Cycladic island of Anafi to be little changed. This tiny, mountainous island just south of Santorini clings on to a way of life that has all but disappeared elsewhere in Greece.
Read all about it in my latest story for the FT.
Aegean Genie
Is Leros the most overlooked of all the Greek islands? Read all about why this lovely Dodecanese island should be on your radar in the latest issue of The Australian’s Travel + Luxury magazine.
With enchanting photos by the always exceptional Thomas Gravanis @storiesbysomeone.
Soul of the Ionian
Northern Zakynthos offers quiet hills and golden coves that are as welcoming as the eccentric maitre d’s. Read all about it in my story for Conde Nast Traveller.
A Gastronomic Exploration of Andros
A gourmet retreat on the Greek island of Andros offers the chance to meet the island’s chefs, farmers, beekeepers — and its cooking monks. At Melisses, you could easily drift off the radar and forget about the rest of the island and the rest of the world. But that would mean missing out on some of the most unspoilt beaches, beautiful villages, and unexpected scenery in the Cyclades.
16 Amazing things to do in Athens
As one of the world’s oldest cities, there’s no surprise at the sheer amount of things to do in Athens – the destination is a master of reinvention. The Parthenon still dominates the skyline – and will forever be one of the key things to do in Athens – but for most Athenians the antiquities embedded among tightly packed apartment blocks are an afterthought. It’s in the graffitied backstreets and café-lined squares, the factories converted into galleries, bars hidden in arcades, and secret coves for skinny dipping where the heartbeat of Athens is racing. Beyond the classics, these are the best things to do in Athens.
Branching Out at Dr Kavvadia’s Farm
Is oleotourism the next big thing? On the Greek island of Corfu, a creative couple has opened up their organic olive oil farm to tours, tastings and overnight stays in a pair of charming cottages that date back to the 19th century.
Divine Revelation
I hadn’t been to Patmos in more than a decade, so my excitement when House and Garden invited me to review a new guesthouse there was tinged with trepidation. Would the Dodecanese island now be overrun with fashionistas, its empty coves lined with designer sunbeds? Would the sacred island’s peaceful atmosphere be ruined by cruise ships? I needn’t have worried. Off season, Patmos remains as meditatively, austerely beautiful as ever. And Pagostas, a 16th century abbot’s house immaculately restored to its monastic glory, encapsulates the best of Patmos. In October, the summer crowds have vanished, leaving this far-flung island to the locals and the cognoscenti who appreciate Patmos for what it really is: a place of year-round pilgrimage for quiet reflection.
16 Amazing things to do in Athens
Discover an icon collection in a neoclassical townhouse, contemporary art installations in a converted tobacco factory, the best place for a picnic or a swim, where to acquire a taste for modern Greek wines, and so much more in this insider guide to Athens in summer 2022.
The best restaurants in Athens right now
From lamb chops eaten kerbside by the kilo, to neo-Greek bistros, sizzling yakitori and Levantine street food, Athens is on a culinary roll. These are the places I enjoy eating most in Athens right now — simple, unpretentious, relaxed and always delicious.
Culturati Club
They say a crisis is good for creativity, and Athens is a case in point. After a decade of fiscal austerity, political turmoil, and social unrest, a city whose cultural baggage once defined its modern identity is reinventing itself as a 21st-century capital of artistic innovation. This is largely thanks to non-profit foundations such as NEON, established in 2013 by art collector and philanthropist Dimitris Daskalopoulos. NEON’s mission is ambitious: to make contemporary art accessible to everyone with site-specific installations in unexpected venues.
As the driving force behind these urban interventions, Elina Kountouri, director of NEON, knows the city and its flourishing art scene better than anyone. Kountouri shared her Athenian cultural highlights and local secrets with me for Travel + Luxury, The Australian’s lifestyle magazine.
A taste of Thessaloniki
Spanish anchovies, Russian salad, quail à la Ali Pasha, breaded brains, courgette moussaka, artichoke mousseline, meatballs egyptiennes, cod in Hollandaise sauce . . . The menu at Olympos Naoussa in Thessaloniki in the 1970s is a tale of cosmopolitan culinary influences befitting a city that’s always been a confluence of cultures. This cult seaside restaurant has reopened, and is now part of the new ON Residence hotel, the best place to spend a long weekend in this epicurean city.
Read all about how Greece’s second city is becoming a new foodie destination in The Times. Including my favourite places to eat and drink in Thessaloniki.
Four New Ways to Fall in Love with Lisbon
Thank you, thank you, thank you Travel + Leisure for sending me on a fact-finding mission to find four of the best new(ish) places to stay in Lisbon. Seven years since my last trip, the city of light and seven hills is a LOT more touristy, but perhaps even lovelier than ever. And who can resist a custard tart? My son and I managed to scoff a dozen in each in four days.
I’ll Follow the Sun
An Odyssey around the Greek Islands during a pandemic was never going to be a breeze, but the lush Ionian archipelago seemed like the ideal antidote to months of cabin fever in a cluttered Athens apartment. I reckoned that if Odysseus could pull it off in a man-powered galley, fending off sirens, six-headed monsters, and a one-eyed giant, I could handle the slings and arrows of unpredictable travel requirements and capricious ferry schedules.
So I set a course for Paxos, a green speck just off the southern tip of Corfu, and intended to journey slowly south, alighting on the smallest, sleepiest Ionian islands, until I reached Odysseus’s homeland of Ithaca. I didn’t have a dozen ships and 600 men, but I did have a straw hat and a weather app.
Islands for the art crowd
“We sat on the terrace under the starry sky and talked about poetry, we drank wine, we swam, we rode donkeys, we played chess — it was like life in a novel,” the painter Niko Ghika wrote of life on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1930s.
When Ghika returned to Hydra in 1936, after living in Paris for almost 20 years, he set about restoring his ancestral home — a 40-room mansion built in the 18th century by his seafaring forebears. Ghika’s brilliant coterie soon followed: Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor, John Craxton, Cartier-Bresson, Walter Gropius, George Seferis, Henry Miller…
By the time Leonard Cohen arrived in 1960, a straggle of nomads with literary and artistic ambitions had settled on the island, forsaking electricity and running water for naked swims, boozy lunches, and creative freedom.
While Hydra still attracts the contemporary art elite, it is no longer affordable for most charismatic dropouts; but the nearby island of Aegina continues to quietly lure artists from Greece and beyond. Whereas Hydra’s paved alleys commemorate naval heroes, on Aegina the streets are named after the artists and writers who adopted this unassuming island only an hour from Athens: Nikos Kazantzakis, Yiannis Moralis, and other leading lights of the so-called ‘1930s generation’. Many of them discovered Aegina because of Nikos Nikolaou, a prolific painter and set designer, as well as a consummate host and inveterate bon viveur.
The charming seaside home on Aegina where Nikolaou spent most of his time from the mid-‘60s until his death in 1986 is now one of the loveliest guesthouses in Greece.
Fringe Benefits
When Marianna Leivaditaki offered to cook me fish soup, I knew it would be good. Marianna is head chef at Morito, one of my favourite restaurants in London. But I didn’t expect to be eating her silky, briny broth for breakfast, on a green bay wedged between granite cliffs on the western shores of Crete. We had never met before Marianna picked me up that morning in her brother Andonis’ motorboat…
Western Crete is full of unexpected twists and turns. There’s a surprise around every hairpin bend in the highlands, a wild world apart from the luminous beaches along the coast. And then there’s the food — reason enough to book a trip, right now.
The best hotels in Greece
Just when you think you know Greece, you’ll happen upon another slice of coast, sail to another island, or stumble across yet another one of the best hotels in Greece – and your perceptions are flipped all over again.
These are 10 of my all-time favourite places to stay in Greece, from an art-filled guesthouse in Aegina to palatial pavilions in the Peloponnese.