Corfu

The Old Town of Corfu is a UNESCO site you can still walk to the supermarket through. It has not been preserved into a museum. Most visitors arrive in August, when the alleys behind the Liston are unwalkable and the Old Port runs three cruise ships at once. Come in October or April. The arcades stay open, the coffee is the same, and you can hear yourself think.

Venetians held Corfu for four hundred years and built the two fortresses that frame the headland. The French laid out the Liston between 1807 and 1814, modelled on the Rue de Rivoli, and the British finished it. The British also brought cricket, still played on the Esplanade most weekends, and tsitsibira, a sharp ginger beer that is genuinely good. Empress Elisabeth of Austria had the Achilleion built outside town as a private retreat; the gardens face out across the strait toward Albania.

The countryside is the other reason to come. A Venetian decree once paid landowners by the olive tree, and the result is several million trees still standing, gnarled and untrimmed on the hillsides above Paleokastritsa. The northeast coast around Kalami and Kassiopi is the corner Gerald Durrell wrote about; cypress runs to limestone, and the swimming coves are reached on foot from the road.

Two practical notes. Kumquat liqueur is a Corfu peculiarity worth a bottle home — the citrus was introduced from East Asia in the nineteenth century and never took anywhere else in Greece. Corfu Town is also one of the few Greek destinations where winter is genuinely worth the trip: Christmas in the arcades, no queues at the museum, and locals still in the cafes.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    CFU (Ioannis Kapodistrias International Airport) handles large-cabin and long-range private jets via Goldair Handling and Signature Flight Support. Helicopter from Athens takes approximately two hours; private aircraft the same route in fifty to sixty minutes via IFLY or Ariston. The airport sits a short transfer from the Old Town and the northern resorts.

  2. The address

    Domes Miramare at Moraitika — built in 1962 for Kalliroi Onassis, half-sister of Aristotle, by the Greek modernist architect Charalambos Sfaellos. Aristotle and Jackie Onassis and Maria Callas were among the guests. Adults-only, 113 rooms and suites, with the private speedboat Miramaretta running excursions from the beach. The property holds its mid-century register more honestly than most.

  3. Etrusco

    Ettore Botrini, Corfiot-Italian, has held Best Restaurant in Greece for fourteen consecutive years by Athinorama's Golden Chef's Hats — the 2026 ceremony confirmed the record. Etrusco sits in Kato Korakiana, fourteen kilometres from the port, open from 19:30. The kitchen grows its own herbs; the sofrito reinterpretation and the lobster with local sprats are the notes to follow.

  4. Theotoky Estate

    The Ropa Valley winery has been in Theotoky family hands for six generations; Georgios Theotokis served four times as Prime Minister of Greece between 1899 and 1909. The estate grows Kakotrygis — a rare Corfiot white that appears almost nowhere else — alongside Robola and Syrah on 5 hectares certified organic since 2013. The property also holds a library of 35,000 volumes focused on the Byzantine world and the Ionian.

  5. Antivouniotissa

    The Museum of Byzantine Art, housed in the late 15th-century Church of the Panagia Antivouniotissa on Arseniou Street, holds around ninety portable icons from the Cretan and Heptanese schools spanning the 15th through 19th centuries — among them works by Michael Damaskinos. Inaugurated in 1984 by Minister Melina Merkouri. Open daily except Tuesday, 08:30 to 15:30. Corfu's quietest serious collection.

  6. The Corfu Trail

    Hilary Whitton Paipeti established the 180-kilometre trail in 2001, running south to north from Kavos to Agios Spiridon in ten stages. Stage 9 — Sokraki to Old Perithia — crosses the Karst Plateau, Corfu's wildest interior, and descends into Old Perithia, an abandoned Venetian village of around 130 stone houses founded c.1350, now partly restored. The Merchant's House in the village square offers six suites in three recovered 19th-century buildings.

  7. Kerasia, by water

    The white-pebble cove between Kouloura and Agios Stefanos on the north-east coast sits beside the Rothschild estate and is best reached by motorboat from the harbour of Agios Stefanos Sinion — ten minutes by water, forty-five by road. San Stefano Boats operates from the same harbour; around the eastern headland, a cluster of unnamed coves is accessible only from the sea. One taverna on the beach; no facilities on the headland coves.

  8. Mon Repos

    The neoclassical villa in the wooded estate of Palaiopolis, south of the Old Town — built between 1828 and 1831 for the British Lord High Commissioner Frederick Adam to a design by Colonel George Whitmore, the same architect as the Palace of St Michael and St George. Prince Philip was born here on 10 June 1921. Since 2001 it has housed the Museum of Palaiopolis, the gardens given over to the remains of ancient Kerkyra.

  9. The Asian Art Museum

    The Palace of St Michael and St George on the north side of the Spianada — the largest building of the British Protectorate period in the Ionian Islands (1815–1864) — houses 15,000 works of Asian art donated primarily by the diplomat Gregorios Manos to the Greek state in 1928. The Chinese collection runs to 3,500 objects; the Japanese to 6,200. Open daily April through October, 08:00 to 20:00. An unexpectedly serious collection inside one of Corfu's most imposing rooms.

  10. Ambelonas

    Ambelonas Corfu, in the Pelekas hills six kilometres from the Old Town — a working vineyard on land held by the Venetian-descended Ventura family since 1600. Vasiliki Karounou runs the table here, a single à la carte hall a few days a week, cooking the Corfiot dishes she gathered into a published cookbook of the island's near-lost recipes. The setting is the old wine-and-oil estate, the cooking the reason to climb.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Gouvia Marina

    Gouvia Marina, in Gouvia Bay a few kilometres north of the Old Town, is where a Corfu charter berths: the D-Marin marina holds up to twelve hundred vessels of as much as sixty metres, with round-the-clock water, power and fuel, security, and a technical yard for engine and hull work. It is a full-service marina, not a town quay — the base most yachts work the island from.

  2. Corfu Town

    Corfu Town keeps two harbours beneath its fortresses. The New Port, run by the Corfu Port Authority, takes the ferries, the coastal traffic and the cruise ships; and below the Old Fortress lies the marina the Venetians walled — still in use, set in the moat-cut water of the Contrafossa that made the citadel an island. A yacht that wants the town at its feet lies here rather than out at Gouvia.

  3. Paleokastritsa

    Paleokastritsa cuts the northwest coast into a run of bays beneath great cliffs, the monastery of 1225 standing on the headland above them. This is the water tradition names as the shore where Odysseus came aground and met Nausicaa; a yacht lies off it for the caves and the clarity, and reaches the coves and grottoes by tender where the rock comes straight down to the sea.

  4. Kassiopi

    Kassiopi holds the northeast coast, a fishing village and harbour of ancient origin — the only city on Corfu besides Corcyra in antiquity, where Cicero once sheltered in the harbour and Nero is said to have performed at the temple altar. The Byzantine castle stands ruined above the village still. A yacht lies in the picturesque harbour at the island’s northeast corner, the castle over its shoulder.