Why Samos has not lost its charm

The migrant crisis has kept visitor numbers down, but the island still delivers the very best of Greece – and some tempting bargains too, says Chris Leadbeater

Psili Ammos is jammed in third gear. It is not that there is nobody on the beach, or in the cafés alongside it. But I cannot help feeling, as I stroll along the shore, that the party hasn’t properly started. It is a shimmering Sunday in July – and yet this popular little holiday enclave, towards the south-east corner of Samos, could scarcely be considered crowded.

There are empty loungers sheltered by idle umbrellas, and there is plenty of space on the sand for the frisbee throwers and paddling families who have set up camp. Opposite, the Ammos Samos Beach Bar is blowing kisses at passers-by: a board set up on the pavement to announce that, contrary to the time limitations of the phrase, its “Happy Hour” will stretch from 4pm to 8pm, with all cocktails priced at €5. Beneath the awning, an underworked waiter toys with his iPhone – checking his texts while he prays for the rush to materialise.

The context to this becalmed state of affairs shapes the skyline. Two miles away across the Mycale Strait, Turkey looks so close as to be tangible. No wonder, then, that last year it was the main jumping-off point for the near-million migrants who crossed into Greece, fleeing war in Syria and Iraq in the hope of a better life in the European Union. Though smaller than Lesvos and Chios, two of the other islands in the path of the diaspora, between January 2015 and March this year Samos received more than 10 per cent of these desperate and displaced people – unseaworthy inflatables dicing with the short journey, life jackets piling up on the north coast in Agios Konstantinos and Karlovasi.

The deal struck between Brussels and Ankara in March, to see migrants returned to Turkey in exchange for concessions on the movement of Turkish citizens in the EU, has attracted criticism from human rights groups – but it has stemmed the flow. The trouble is, while you will not spot asylum-seekers on Samos if you visit this summer, the same can be said, to an extent, of tourists. And an island whose economy depends on a solid stream of visitors to support its hotels and restaurants is starting to suffer.

Over in the capital Vathy, in the town hall – the stately building where the island signed itself up to be part of the modern Greece in 1912 – Michalis Angelopoulos,