Corfu

The Old Town of Corfu is a UNESCO site that people still walk through to the supermarket. It is a working town and has not been preserved as a museum. Most visitors arrive in August, when the alleys behind the Liston are too crowded to walk and the Old Port takes three cruise ships at once. Come in October or April. The arcades stay open, the coffee is the same, and the town is quiet.

The Venetians held Corfu for 400 years and built the two fortresses that frame the headland. The French laid out the Liston, the arcaded promenade, between 1807 and 1814 on the model of 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. Its gardens face across the strait towards Albania.

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

Two practical notes. Kumquat liqueur is a Corfu speciality worth taking home. The fruit was introduced from East Asia in the nineteenth century and never took hold anywhere else in Greece. Corfu Town is also one of the few Greek destinations where winter is worth the trip, with Christmas in the arcades, no queues at the museum, and locals still in the cafes.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Corfu’s Ioannis Kapodistrias International Airport (CFU) takes large-cabin and long-range private jets, handled by Goldair Handling and Signature Flight Support. The helicopter from Athens takes about 2 hours, and a private plane flies the same route in 50 to 60 minutes with IFLY or Ariston. The airport is a short transfer from the Old Town and the northern resorts.

  2. The address

    Domes Miramare at Moraitika was 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 its guests. It is for adults only, with 113 rooms and suites, and its private speedboat, the Miramaretta, runs trips from the beach. It keeps its mid-century character more faithfully than most.

  3. Etrusco

    Etrusco, the restaurant of the Corfiot-Italian Ettore Botrini, sits in Kato Korakiana, 14 kilometres from the port, and opens from 7.30pm. The kitchen grows its own herbs. The dishes to follow are its reinterpretation of sofrito, the Corfiot veal dish, and the lobster with local sprats.

  4. Theotoky Estate

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

  5. Antivouniotissa

    The Museum of Byzantine Art fills the late 15th-century Church of the Panagia Antivouniotissa on Arseniou Street. It holds around 90 portable icons of the Cretan and Heptanese, or Ionian, schools, from the 15th to the 19th century, among them works by Michael Damaskinos. Melina Merkouri, then minister, opened it in 1984. It is open every day except Tuesday, from 8.30am to 3.30pm, and is the quietest serious collection on Corfu.

  6. The Corfu Trail

    Hilary Whitton Paipeti set up the 180-kilometre trail in 2001. It runs south to north, from Kavos to Agios Spiridon, in ten stages. Stage 9, from Sokraki to Old Perithia, crosses the Karst Plateau, the wildest part of inland Corfu. It ends in Old Perithia, an abandoned Venetian village of around 130 stone houses, founded around 1350 and now partly restored. The Merchant’s House on the village square has six suites in three restored 19th-century buildings.

  7. Kerasia, by water

    Kerasia is a white-pebble cove between Kouloura and Agios Stefanos on the north-east coast, beside the Rothschild estate. It is best reached by motorboat from the harbour of Agios Stefanos Sinion: 10 minutes by water, 45 by road. San Stefano Boats works from the same harbour. Around the eastern headland, a cluster of unnamed coves can be reached only from the sea. Kerasia has one taverna on the beach, and the headland coves have no facilities.

  8. Mon Repos

    Mon Repos is the neoclassical villa in the wooded estate of Palaiopolis, south of the Old Town. It was built from 1828 to 1831 for the British Lord High Commissioner Frederick Adam, to a design by Colonel George Whitmore, architect of 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, and its gardens hold 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, is the largest building of the British Protectorate in the Ionian Islands (1815 to 1864). It houses 15,000 works of Asian art, given to the Greek state in 1928 mainly by the diplomat Gregorios Manos. The Chinese collection runs to 3,500 objects and the Japanese to 6,200. It is open every day from April to October, 8am to 8pm. The collection is unexpectedly serious, in one of the most imposing rooms on Corfu.

  10. Ambelonas

    Ambelonas Corfu lies in the Pelekas hills, 6 kilometres from the Old Town. It is a working vineyard on land the Ventura family, of Venetian descent, has held since 1600. Vasiliki Karounou runs the table, a single à la carte hall open a few days a week. She cooks 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, and the cooking is 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 1,200 vessels of up to 60 metres, with water, power and fuel around the clock, security and a technical yard for engine and hull work. It is a full-service marina rather than a town quay, and most yachts work the island from here.

  2. Corfu Town

    Corfu Town has two harbours beneath its fortresses. The New Port, run by the Corfu Port Authority, takes the ferries, the coastal traffic and the cruise ships. Below the Old Fortress lies the marina the Venetians walled, still in use, in the water of the Contrafossa, the moat that made the citadel an island, and 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 high cliffs, with the monastery of 1225 standing on the headland above them. Tradition names this as the shore where Odysseus came aground and met Nausicaa. A yacht lies off it for the caves and the clear water, and a tender reaches the coves and grottoes where the rock comes straight down to the sea.

  4. Kassiopi

    Kassiopi, on the northeast coast, is a fishing village and harbour of ancient origin. In antiquity it was the only city on Corfu besides Corcyra, the ancient city of Corfu; Cicero once sheltered in its harbour, and Nero is said to have performed at the temple altar. A yacht lies in the harbour at the island’s northeast corner, with the ruined Byzantine castle still standing above the village.

Mythology

  1. Calypso

    Homer never says where Ogygia lies, and the ancients argued about it. He fixes only the raft’s landfall, Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, whom Corcyra, now Corfu, claimed as its old inhabitants. On Othonoi, northwest of Corfu, a sea cave at Aspri Ammos is called Calypso’s cave, and 16th-century naval maps described the island as hers.

  2. Charybdis

    Homer fixes Charybdis to no map, and the whole episode is a tale Odysseus tells in the hall of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians. In the fifth century BC the historian Thucydides records that Corcyra, now Corfu, traced the renown of its fleet to the Phaeacians as the island’s old inhabitants.

  3. Leucothea

    In the Odyssey, Leucothea gives Odysseus her immortal veil and tells him to swim for the land of the Phaeacians. This collection follows the tradition that places Scheria, the shore he reaches before returning the veil, on Corfu.

  4. Medusa

    Medusa fills the west pediment, the triangle under the roof, of the temple of Artemis at Corcyra. She reaches towards her son, with leopards on either side and Zeus fighting a giant in the corner. It was carved about 580 BC, and the original is still on Corfu.

  5. The Phaeacians

    Homer calls the island of the Phaeacians Scheria, not Corcyra. Thucydides records that the people of Corcyra claimed the Phaeacians as their forerunners and traced their fame at sea back to them, and that ancient claim, not Homer’s own map, is why the Phaeacians are linked with Corfu.