The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Fancy your own island hideaway? Look no further
You don’t need to travel all the way to the Caribbean to find an exclusive escape, says Laura Fowler
When you need to press pause, take stock, regroup with your nearest and dearest and truly switch off, there is surely no better a holiday destination than an island. An adventure all by itself, an island means freedom and independence, each a refuge, exclusive by the sheer nature of being cut off from civilisation and crowds, from noise and news and rules – and the smaller the island, the greater the leap from the every day.
More exclusive still is the private island, that rarified microcosm of unreal life adrift in the blue. Step off the boat, and we immediately escape from the world into a castaway fantasy that has been curated just-so by its owners, all imperfections and ugly modern necessities airbrushed out.
Usually all this conjures images of the tropics: palm trees ringed by white-gold sand and turquoise waters. But Europe has more than a few underthe-radar delights of its own, which tend to be wilder than Branson’s Caribbean Necker, rougher round the edges than Polynesian the Brando. For true romantics, the manicured glamour of the Indian Ocean cannot rival the windswept drama of a Scottish isle or the rugged beauty of a Mediterranean hideaway. And all this beauty so tantalisingly close to home, meaning no long-haul flights and no jet lag.
Here are 10 of Europe’s most wonderful hideaway island escapes; some semiprivate and some completely so. All are ideal for people who like having very little to do...
PRIVATE ISLAND RETREAT,
GREECE
A charming Greek Island
all of your own
There aren’t many private islands in the Mediterranean, and the moment you step onto the pier of the Private Island Retreat, lined with pale-grey deckchairs and lapped by luminous blue-green water, you know you’ve arrived somewhere very special. This magical hideaway comes with a 1920s mansion on a 900-acre estate fringed with sandy coves – all the ingredients for the dreamiest holiday with family and friends. Slate terraces with shady nooks for outdoor dining, dozing or reading surround the waterfront villa, which has been in the same family since the early 20th century. Every lightfilled room is filled with beautiful objects that tell a story: prints by modern Greek masters collected over generations; huge fireplaces made with salvaged stones; a dining table from the mess of the original owner’s ship.
Apart from the current owners (a discreet and gracious couple who live on the island with their menagerie of pets and farm animals), your chef and butler, the entire island is yours to explore. There are mountain bikes for pedalling through the pistachio and olive groves, a paddleboard and pedal-boat to keep kids happy for hours, and a kitesurfing and windsurfing school just across the strait for restless teens. You drift off and wake up to the sounds of warbling birds, sighing waves, swaying leaves – the tranquillity of the setting and purity of the air bring deep, restorative sleep. All this, only an hour or two from Athens. Rachel Howard
From £24,000 a week, sleeping 20 plus infants in the main house (00 30 69345 32223; privateislandretreat. com). Fly to Athens, take a ferry from Rafina to Marmari (one hour), then it’s a 10-minute transfer by speedboat or longer by fishing boat. Or a speedboat straight from Rafina to the island takes 30 minutes
ISLE OF ERISKA, SCOTLAND A winning mix of luxury and
nature in West Argyll
Herons stalk the waters, deer and Highland cattle punctuate the landscape, and those in luck might see golden eagles swooping overhead. Isle of Eriska is a wonderfully remote-yetaccessible natural haven with a firstclass hotel attached. The 300-acre private island is dramatically set at the mouth of Loch Creran and offers a fabulous outlook to the Morvern Mountains; it’s close to Oban (so within comfortable striking distance of Glasgow) and is separated from the mainland by a narrow strip of water. Clatter across a wooden bridge to reach a splendid baronial-style edifice complete with turrets and gables.
It’s a country house retreat with immensely pleasing attributes, from classic fireplaces to an indoor swimming pool and, best of all, a Michelinstarred restaurant (top dishes include sea trout with bouillabaisse sauce). The 34 bedrooms are classically stylish – 16 in the main house, the others spread around the grounds.
But it’s the outdoors that most appeals, whether that means croquet, tennis, boat trips or walking trails. Harriet O’Brien
Isle of Eriska (01631 720371; eriska-hotel.co.uk) offers doubles from £315, including breakfast. Drive three hours from Glasgow or arrive by air: helicopters can land on the island, or fly a private plane to Oban airport (at North Connel) five miles from the hotel
TAGOMAGO, IBIZA
A Bond lair in the Balearics
Those that think they’ve “done” Ibiza may want to think again, because unless you’ve sipped an iced G&T at sunset as Captain Andres ferries you by Boston Whaler between the Balearic hotspot and your own private island bolthole, you haven’t lived.
Tagomago is the shimmering green and white rock that sheers vertically from the Mediterranean just east of San Carlos. It is home to a single property (lonesome lighthouse aside), a sprawling, modernist villa with spectacular views. The five-bed pad is anchored to its surroundings by a central stone tower, but the Balearics’ familiar rustic vernacular ends there – this is the archetypal Bond lair, all sleek black floors, minimalist white furniture and splashy contemporary art. There are 007-style add-ons galore, from the LED-lit salt-water swimming pool to the professional chef ’s kitchen.
The pine-shaded island is crisscrossed with nature trails, and while it doesn’t have beaches per se, there are secretive rocky coves aplenty. The real fun, however, is to be had at sea; water and jet skiing, paddle boarding, canoeing, fishing and more. In high summer the island’s sheltered west coast is a coveted spot for in-the-know yachties who seek out the limpid, fishfilled waters to drop anchor. The pretty Ibiza cove of Pou des Lleo is five minutes by Highfield tender, or head the other way for to Ibiza’s sister island of Formentera, where the beaches are peppered with fish shacks.
Maya Boyd
From £124,826 a week, sleeping 10 (020 3411 3675; dynamiclives.com). Includes chef, two house staff and boat captain. Fly to Ibiza where the boat will collect you from the beach at Pou d’es Lléo
OBONJAN, CROATIA A festival feeling in nature
Rising from the turquoise Adriatic in Dalmatia, from afar this tiny pine-clad islet appears totally unassuming. It’s only as you approach the rocky shoreline, and hear a steady beat and dreamy uplifting melodies drifting across the bay, that you realise you’ve arrived somewhere rather extraordinary.
Owned by Sibenik City Council, this 136-acre islet is on a 43-year lease to Obonjan Riviera and now owned by local Željko Perekovic, who relaunched it as a family-friendly glamping retreat in 2022. Here, a mix of couples and young families can spend carefree sunny days indulging in yoga and Thai massage below the pines, splashing across the sparkling sea aboard kayaks and SUPs, lounging on waterside sunbeds in the shade of straw parasols, or snoozing on four-posters by the hilltop pool. Come sundown, it’s cocktails and chill-out music, followed by suppers of grilled fresh fish and Mediterranean salads, or cheerful pizza with chilled lagers, bathed in balmy twilight.
Formerly dubbed a party island with a programme of riotous summer music festivals and parties (US actor-singer Jared Leto bagged it for three nights in 2020), it now has a more low-key image, but will nonetheless host occasional events. Accommodation options include wooden sun lodges and woodand-canvas forest lodges (both fully furnished, with beds, cupboards, shower, power and even air-conditioning) and covered porches for sitting out), hidden among woodland of tow
ering Aleppo pines and fragrant lavender. Before bed, you might indulge in some stargazing from the island’s south beach, far from the bright lights of the more urban mainland.
Jane Foster
Bell tents from £112 per night, or forest lodges from £162 per night, including
THE WEATHER ISLANDS A spellbinding retreat in
the far west of Sweden
Sunsets don’t come much better than at Vaderoarna, or the Weather Islands, seal-frequented specks of granite at the very western edge of Sweden. The archipelago is owned by the National Property Board of Sweden, which conserves places of historic value, and is about a 40-minute speedboat ride from Hamburgsund on the mainland – and a world away. The cluster of weatherboard properties on the principal island was home to a community of sea pilots until the mid-1960s and there’s still a wonderfully homespun, old-school feel at the charming inn here.
The 19 bedrooms, split between the main building and very tranquil cottages, have simple wicker furnishings and vases of wild flowers. Nine have ensuite bathrooms; the rest share facilities, which adds to the homey, olden-times mood. The food – lobster, salmon and more – is fabulous. There are kayaking tours and boat and fishing trips to keep guests well entertained, but there’s little to beat just sitting on the rocks, gazing out to sea and tuning into nature.
Harriet O’Brien
Vaderoarna Inn (vaderoarna.com) offers doubles with communal bathroom from £178pp based on two sharing for one night. Includes all meals, return speedboat trip from Hamburgsund (about a 90-minute drive north of Gothenburg); additional nights from £93
EMBIEZ, FRANCE
A protected Provence-style paradise
The Ile des Embiez is a concentration of the French Med, a 235-acre model version of the best bits. You hop on the ferry at Six-Fours-les-Plages, near Toulon, hop off 12 minutes later and at once are in a convincing facsimile of a Provençal village: shops, a square, bars, a winery, farniente by the skip-full, but all wonderfully disciplined. There’s also a four-star hotel, Hélios, dominating the port, luxury cottages and flats, and restaurants for all.
Beyond this smudge of civilisation, the island goes wild in an – albeit protected – Mediterranean manner. Back in 1958, Embiez was bought by Paul Ricard, the drinks magnate who not only flooded France with pastis but was also an early ecologist. “Controlled development” was his thing. Thus the majority of the island – still property of the Ricards – comprises unspoiled creeks and coves, great stretches of maquis and pine woods, vineyards and representatives of 90 per cent of all Med flora. On the (almost) car-less island, you get about by foot or hired bike. Anthony Peregrine
Hélios offers doubles from £125, studios sleeping two – or three, at a pinch – start at £83, one-bed apartments from £98 (00 334 9410 65 0; lesilespaulricard. com). From Toulon it’s a 30-minute taxi ride to Six-Fours-Les-Plages for the ferry
CAVALLO, CORSICA
The Mustique of the Mediterranean
Herons stalk the waters and those in luck might see golden eagles swooping overhead
In the treacherous waters between Corsica and Sardinia, Cavalló is a slip of half a square-mile in the otherwise uninhabited Lavezzi archipelago. It has beaches of otherworldly beauty – opalescent bays with pale, fine sand between gigantic granite boulders, sculpted as though by Henry Moore – and an intriguing past. First it drew Romans, who cut columns from its granite to build their Eternal City; then, two millennia later, Parisians, when 1960s disco king Jean Castel bought Cavalló and built a nightclub and surreal cave-houses. Catherine Deneuve, Sacha Distel and Princess
Caroline of Monaco flew in to eat lobster, drink champagne and dance barefoot on the sand – a scene that grew increasingly hedonistic, the villas ever more dazzling, until the 1990s when Corsican environmentalists put a stop to further development.
Now it’s owned by a syndicate of landowners, who safeguard its wildflower coast and rake its shores free of seaweed, litter and noisy interlopers. Lobster and champagne remain the order of the day at its only hotel, which hosts a new generation of celebrity – Beyoncé, Bono and Ronaldo. The best time to come is June or September, when the island is quiet enough that you can trip along its thyme-scented paths (on foot, bicycle or golf buggy – no cars here), and find a beach that’s deserted, but for you and the bees.
Laura Fowler
Hotel & Spa des Pecheurs
(00 334 9570 3639; hoteldespecheurs. com) offers doubles from £250 and can arrange transfers from Figari airport by car and speedboat. Doubles from £250. Alternatively rent a villa via cavalloisland.com
EILEAN SHONA, SCOTLAND
A Branson-owned Hebridean heaven
The Bransons like an island or two, but this is not Necker, Sir Richard’s sunsoaked Caribbean retreat. This is his sister Vanessa’s version of island life – a remote Hebridean hideaway, just two miles long by one-and-a-half miles wide, offering old-school adventure and escapism. There are no roads, just paths weaving through the reeds and rhododendrons, avenues of towering trees and bracken. Peter Pan author JM Barrie holidayed here in the 1920s – and found his Lost Boys’ Neverland, writing: “It almost taketh the breath away to find so perfectly appointed a retreat on these wild shores.”
The eclectically decorated “big house” sleeps 18, or there are nine cottages to bed down in, sprinkled around the coast or up in the woods. This is the place to rediscover the joy of rock-pooling and fishing for your supper from the pontoon, climbing trees, sizzling sausages or toasting marshmallows around the fire pit, swimming in an icy sea, picnicking on the perfect arc of sand at Shoe Bay, poking through ruined crofters’ cottages at Baramore beach and scrabbling up the wiry heather-sprung peaks. Red squirrels scamper through the trees, red deer graze contentedly outside your door and otters and seals dive in the waves. Lucy Gillmore
Shepherd’s Cottage sleeps two and costs £1,200 per week; the Old Schoolhouse sleeps four and costs from £2,000 (01967
HENRIKSHOLM, SWEDEN A slice of Scandinavian silence
You could not describe Henriksholm as a private island in the most accepted sense of the term. It does not gleam gently in Caribbean sunlight, nor snooze in tropical shallows. But, in recompense, it does come swaddled in the sort of tranquility that – amid the turbulence of the past two years – has rarely been more in demand. Four miles long, but barely half a mile wide, it sits within Animmen, a sliver of a lake some 100 miles northeast of Gothenburg in the southerly Swedish province of Dalsland. It has been owned by the Berger family since 1993, and, since 2017, has been home to five tiny clear-sided cabins – in which there is room for a bed, but little else. If this sounds simplistic, then this is the point. Guests are encouraged to surrender to their surroundings, waking to the sight of the water through the walls, or strolling in the forest. And while meals are taken at the main house, human interaction can be pared to as much of a minimum as feels comfortable. Chris Leadbeater
Cabins for two from £809 for three nights, including meals (stenebynas.se/ henriksholm). The island is an easy two-hour drive from Gothenburg
ISOLA DELLE ROSE, VENICE The city of water, but not as
you know it
The Isola delle Rose has long been a place for rest and recuperation. A sanatorium opened in 1914, it closed in 1980 but, in 2015, Marriott transformed the fine old buildings into a luxurious 40-acre retreat.
The hurly-burly of St Mark’s Square is just a 20-minute boat ride away; Venice’s timeless domes are visible from the rooftop pool. But all is calm here: the decor across the 266 rooms and suites is refreshing whites, mint greens, soft blues; the generous grounds are peppered with 100-year-old chestnuts and cedars; the spa is light-filled and soothing. There’s also a kitchen garden and olive grove, the spoils of which make their way onto Michelin-starred chef Fabio Trabocchi’s tasting menus at the exclusive Fiola at Dopolavoro restaurant. For more casual eats there is Sagra, where traditional fare comes with lagoon views. Zipping into the city is the main attraction, though the resort also offers garden tours, wine tastings, a cookery school, kids’ club and, new for 2022, a centre dedicated to Venetian rowing – learn this unique sport, paddling around the island and along the city’s canals.
Sarah Baxter
Human interaction can be pared to as much of a minimum as feels comfortable
JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa (00 39 04185 21300; jwmarriottvenice.com) offers doubles from £378. Fly to Venice; the hotel runs a free boat shuttle to the island from St Mark’s Square