Elounda
Elounda holds the densest concentration of grande-dame resort hotels in Greece, set along the sheltered eastern shore of the Gulf of Mirabello, where the water lies calm and deep in a bay the open sea never quite reaches. For a certain kind of traveller the name is shorthand in itself — the discreet Cretan retreat taken behind a wall and a private pool, with the fortress island of Spinalonga held in the view across the water. Several of the houses here have been refined across half a century, and they remain the reason most guests come.
The village itself is modest — a working harbour, a square of tavernas, fishing boats drawn up on the quay — and sits a little below the hotels that carried its name abroad. It lies ten kilometres north of Agios Nikolaos, reached by a corniche road that drops in slow curves to the shore with the whole gulf opening beneath it. The arrangement is deliberate: guests keep to the quiet northern stretch and come down into the village for an evening meal or a boat out.
A low isthmus joins the mainland to the Kolokytha peninsula, and beside it lie the old salt pans and a narrow canal cut by French engineers at the close of the nineteenth century, when the salt here was still worked in earnest. In the shallows alongside rests Olous, a Greco-Roman city long since sunk beneath the surface; harbour walls and a fish mosaic from an early Christian basilica can be made out through the clear water, swum over rather than visited.
Across the bay the village of Plaka faces Spinalonga directly and makes the shortest crossing to the island, and has quietly become the better place for lunch on the water, looking back at Elounda. The Kolokytha peninsula beyond the causeway is bare, walkable and all but empty, ending in a sheltered cove that is among the calmest swimming on this coast.
Elounda has no airport of its own. Arrival is a flight to Heraklion and a little over an hour east on the national road, the final stretch dropping down from Agios Nikolaos to the gulf. Three nights settle the pace; four if you mean to give Spinalonga, the inland villages and the long lunches their due.
House Notes
The architect
Elounda was a fishing village until the architect Spyros Kokotos and his wife Eliana bought land on the gulf in the late 1960s, when Cretan tourism had barely begun, and set out to build the finest hotels in Greece. Kokotos had worked on the Athens Hilton while still a student, went on to design more than forty hotels, and co-founded the country’s tourism confederation. He died in 2025, at ninety-two; this coast is his.
Domes of Elounda
Domes of Elounda is laid out like a village above the gulf — 78 suites and 40 villas, with 28 Domes Luxury Residences that each take a private pool. The adults-only Chora wing holds designer stone retreats with plunge pools and the Soma Spa.
Cayo Exclusive
Cayo Exclusive stands on the hillside above the village of Plaka, at the northern reach of the gulf, its pool suites set down the slope with Spinalonga and the open water in front of them. The resort keeps its own stretch of seafront below the village.
Elounda Gulf Villas
Elounda Gulf Villas is built around its spa villas — the Imperial and the Royal Spa Villas, the largest of them 350 square metres, each with a private pool above the water. The Elixir Spa will send its treatments and massages up to the villa through the concierge, rather than the guest going down to a treatment room.
The Ferryman
The Ferryman, on the Elounda waterfront at Akti Oloundos, takes its name from the BBC series Who Pays the Ferryman?, shot in the village and broadcast through the winter of 1977 — its Yannis Markopoulos theme a chart hit that sent a generation of British travellers to Crete. The kitchen under Michalis Ntounetas works modern Cretan cooking from the day’s catch, the bay open in front of the tables.
Marilena
Marilena has run on Akti Posidonos, the Elounda waterfront, since 1977 — the same family, a Greek and Cypriot kitchen built on meze, the day’s fish and flame-grilled meat. The Psarosoupa Marilena, the house fish soup, is the dish to order; tables sit under the grapevines on the front or back in the garden.
Olous
The sunken city out in the bay is Olous, whose patron was Britomartis, the Cretan goddess of the hunt — her image struck on the city’s coins, and a wooden cult statue of her here was credited in antiquity to Daedalus. Olous quarrelled long with neighbouring Lato over its boundaries before the two cities settled the matter by treaty.
The Lasithi Plateau
Inland and an hour up, the Lasithi Plateau is a high bowl of farmland ringed by the Dikti mountains, its villages set around the rim. The Diktaean Cave above Psychro is where myth hides the infant Zeus from Cronus — the goat Amalthea at nurse, the Kouretes drumming to drown his cries — and where Minoan pilgrims left bronze and terracotta votives for centuries. The cave is shut for a restoration of nearly €16m cutting a cable car to its mouth, and may not yet have reopened.
Spinalonga
Spinalonga’s fortress was begun in 1579, the Venetians’ work to hold the mouth of the gulf. From 1904 until 1957 the island was a leper colony, and that is the history most visitors come for. Boats run out from Elounda’s own quay as well as from Plaka opposite — the first morning crossing is the one to take, before the day boats from Agios Nikolaos reach the rock.