Rolling in the isles
The Greek Sporades islands are the new A-lister destinations for their secluded villas, unspoilt beaches and delicious Greek tavernas
ROLLING IN THE ISLES
Now that the ‘Mamma Mia!’ tourists are leaving, the Sporades islands are welcoming a stream of discreet A-listers to their secluded villas, simple restaurants and empty, unspoilt beaches. Samuel Muston embarks on an Aegean odyssey
s the old ferry lurches into Patitiri, on the island of Alonissos, my friend calls me from the deck where he has had his eyes trained on the sea for the two-hour journey from Skiathos. ‘It looks,’ he says, ‘like a swimming pool.’ And, indeed, it does: the water, dappled by the morning sun, is Matisse blue, and seems brighter still against the pine trees that clothe the pocket-sized port. It has been a tough journey – a broken plane, a five-hour delay, a turbulent sea – but the port, its three streets rising up a steep bank and the adjacent gaggle of quay-hugging restaurants, has a tranquillising beauty. The stress seeps out through the soles of my loafers.
We flew into Skiathos, the most well-known of the Sporades islands, from where you take a ferry to Skopelos, Alonissos and Skyros. These four tiny islands, spread like confetti in the north Aegean, have largely escaped the notice of hotel developers who spoiled so many Mediterranean islands in the Sixties and Seventies. So when I look through the windows of Villa Jura in Alonissos, I see only pine groves, sea, and the occasional red-tiled roof. It’s almost untouched by tourism; the roads weren’t built until 1990, and the first phones arrived in 1994 – and then only pay phones.
Skopelos and Skiathos were put firmly on the map by the 2008 movie Mamma Mia! (the wedding scenes were filmed in a church in Skopelos), but that trail is cooling off, with movie tourists giving way to movie stars: Kate Hudson came last year, as did Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Leonardo DiCaprio sailed in, joining Robert De Niro and John Travolta, while Al Pacino was spotted eating lobster spaghetti at Agnontas Mouria restaurant in neighbouring Skopelos. Alonissos, the most beautiful of the four islands, is 129.6sq km with 4,600 inhabitants. It is a sort of anti-Mykonos, which in the summer is full of selfie-stick-wielding tourists and paparazzi with long lenses (if you’re an A-lister seeking privacy, Mykonos is one to avoid). This is partly why the quiet Sporades are so appealing, with their high clifftops and deep inlets giving their coastal villas unrivalled privacy.
Where celebrities tread, the rest follow: British Airways has just started direct flights from London to Skiathos, and the real boon was the arrival of the high-end villa companies. Before, you were limited to small hotels, but now companies such as The Thinking Traveller, who spotted the buzz and made the Greek islands its flagship destination last year, are in on the act. The company took on six villas, the most expensive being Maistros, at £13,185 a week, and were immediately sold out.
Its concierge service caters to the most A-list of whims (it once flew a grand piano in for a celebrity and can arrange a 45-minute helicopter ride from Athens for about £3,500).
We stay in the east, on the high cliffs overlooking the tiny, flower-filled village of
Steni Vala. Our villa sits on the end of a rocky outcrop just across the bay, so you can sometimes smell the souvlaki (skewered meat) grilling in the four village restaurants. There’s a shop selling local trinkets and olive oil, and an outsized marina, which has now been enlarged to take bigger yachts. It recently hosted the Conran family’s boat, and they apparently favoured a restaurant called Tassia’s Cooking – and so do we, particularly the Alonissos pie, a molten mass of cheese and filo pastry.
Our first villa, Jura, looks like an émigré from the Hollywood hills, with four bedrooms, a triangular infinity pool, Le Corbusier chairs and a collection of art to rival an east London gallery. Architect Frank Gehry recently enjoyed its spectacular clifftop views. It is close to perfect. Hibiscus, the second, is more traditional, an
enlarged fisherman’s house, with a pool overlooking the pebble beach of Agios Petros.
These large houses-for-rent are entirely private, so you can engage with the outside world as little or as much as you like (many celebrities use private chefs, who arrive for the season, disappearing back to the mainland in winter). If you venture beyond your pool, head to Agios Dimitrios, a vast and peaceful V-shaped white pebble beach 3.3 miles from Steni Vala. Here, we spend a day drinking rosé and eating dolmades (stuffed vines), and we’re a little put out to have to share it with one other sunbather the next day.
With beach roads and tiny hamlets peeling off endless steep lanes, you’ll need to hire a car or rent a boat from either harbour to chug around the caves and inlets into which the blue Aegean Sea floods, or to explore the uninhabited Two Brothers islands in The National Marine Park of Alonissos, a vast wildlife oasis. The vibe is friendly, and people seem quick to chat. And with no clubs, restaurants are where socialising is done. Marco and Carlo, oriental art dealers with a house here, invite us out on their boat, despite having met us only the day before. They arrived here 20 years ago and are treated with the familiarity of a close relative by just about everyone. But then so are we, and we only arrived four days ago. It is that sort of place.
At the end of a week spent blissfully supine between cobalt skies and cobalt sea, it’s easy to see why Alonissos is drawing celebrities like iron filings to a magnet. It is the fantasy island: unspoilt, unpretentious and under the radar. It’s difficult not to be transfixed by the island’s pebbled coves, the blue-green water tinkling them like a xylophone, by the high cliffs, the knots of olive trees providing shade and the smell of pine and oregano, all telling you why you should return next year.