Elounda

Elounda has the densest concentration of grande-dame resort hotels in Greece. They line 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 stands for a discreet Cretan retreat behind a wall, with a private pool and the fortress island of Spinalonga in the view across the water. Several of these hotels have been refined over half a century, and they remain the reason most guests come.

The village itself is modest: a working harbour, a square of tavernas and fishing boats drawn up on the quay. It sits a little below the hotels that made its name known abroad, 10 kilometres north of Agios Nikolaos. A coast road reaches it, dropping in slow curves to the shore with the whole gulf opening below. The layout is deliberate: guests keep to the quiet northern stretch and come down to the village for an evening meal or a boat trip.

A low isthmus joins the mainland to the Kolokytha peninsula. Beside it lie the old salt pans and a narrow canal that French engineers cut at the end of the nineteenth century, when the salt here was still worked in earnest. In the shallows alongside lies Olous, a Greco-Roman city that sank beneath the surface long ago. Its harbour walls and a fish mosaic from an early Christian basilica show through the clear water. You see them by swimming over them.

Across the bay, the village of Plaka faces Spinalonga directly and has the shortest crossing to the island. It has become the better place for lunch by the water, looking back at Elounda. The Kolokytha peninsula beyond the causeway is bare, walkable and almost empty. It ends in a sheltered cove with some of the calmest swimming on this coast.

Elounda has no airport of its own. Fly to Heraklion, then drive a little over an hour east on the national road; the last stretch drops from Agios Nikolaos to the gulf. Three nights let you settle into the pace. Take four if you want to give Spinalonga, the inland villages and the long lunches their due.

House Notes

  1. 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. Cretan tourism had barely begun, and they set out to build the finest hotels in Greece. Kokotos had worked on the Athens Hilton while still a student. He went on to design more than 40 hotels and co-founded the country’s tourism confederation. He died in 2025, aged 92.

  2. Domes of Elounda

    Domes of Elounda is laid out like a village above the gulf. It has 78 suites and 40 villas, and its 28 Domes Luxury Residences each have a private pool. The adults-only Chora wing holds designer stone retreats with plunge pools, along with the Soma Spa.

  3. Cayo Exclusive

    Cayo Exclusive stands on the hillside above the village of Plaka, at the northern end of the gulf. Its pool suites step down the slope, with Spinalonga and the open water in front of them. The resort has its own stretch of seafront below the village.

  4. Elounda Gulf Villas

    Elounda Gulf Villas is built around its spa villas, the Imperial and the Royal Spa Villas. The largest is 350 square metres, and each has a private pool above the water. The Elixir Spa will send its treatments and massages up to the villa through the concierge, so the guest need not go down to a treatment room.

  5. The Ferryman

    The Ferryman, on the Elounda waterfront at Akti Oloundos, takes its name from the BBC series Who Pays the Ferryman? The series was shot in the village and broadcast through the winter of 1977. Its theme by Yannis Markopoulos was a chart hit that sent a generation of British travellers to Crete. The kitchen under Michalis Ntounetas cooks modern Cretan food from the day’s catch, with the bay open in front of the tables.

  6. Marilena

    Marilena has stood on Akti Posidonos, the Elounda waterfront, since 1977, run by the same family. Its Greek and Cypriot kitchen is built on meze, the day’s fish and flame-grilled meat. The dish to order is the Psarosoupa Marilena, the house fish soup. Tables sit under the grapevines at the front or back in the garden.

  7. Olous

    The sunken city out in the bay is Olous. Its patron was Britomartis, the Cretan goddess of the hunt, whose image was struck on the city’s coins. In antiquity a wooden cult statue of her here was credited to Daedalus. Olous quarrelled long with neighbouring Lato over its boundaries, until the two cities settled the matter by treaty.

  8. The Lasithi Plateau

    An hour inland and uphill, the Lasithi Plateau is a high bowl of farmland ringed by the Dikti mountains, with its villages set around the rim. In myth, the infant Zeus was hidden from Cronus in the Diktaean Cave above Psychro, nursed by the goat Amalthea while the Kouretes drummed to drown his cries. Minoan pilgrims left bronze and terracotta offerings there for centuries. The cave is shut for a restoration of nearly €16m that adds a cable car to its mouth, and may not yet have reopened.

  9. Spinalonga

    The Venetians began Spinalonga’s fortress in 1579 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 and from Plaka opposite. Take the first morning crossing, before the day boats from Agios Nikolaos reach the rock.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The Elounda quay

    Elounda has no port fund of its own. Its water is one of the outlying port zones the Municipality of Agios Nikolaos keeps beyond its own harbour (Elounda, Plaka, Sisi and Milato), administered jointly by the Municipal Port Fund and the Port Authority, whose Elounda station stands on Akti Olountos at the head of the front. The quay itself is a working one, used by the fishing boats and the caiques, with the gulf of Mirabello in front of it.

  2. Kolokytha

    Kolokytha, Greek for “pumpkin”, is the islet at the seaward end of Elounda’s water: 14 hectares of bare rock, lying some 850 metres east of the Spinalonga peninsula and forming a bay with it. To the north, a narrow strip of water divides it from the fortress island. The bay is reached only from the sea, and suits a day at anchor with a tender ashore.

  3. The Spinalonga strait

    The island of Spinalonga stands at the northern mouth of the gulf, with some 750 metres of water between it and Plaka on the Cretan shore and a narrower strip between it and Kolokytha. Its dock belongs to the excursion boats, which land hundreds of thousands of visitors on the island each year. A yacht lies out in the strait and sends a tender in to the fortress ashore.

  4. Plaka

    Plaka is the fishing village on the far shore of the gulf, 5 kilometres from Elounda’s main square. Its quay is one of the four port zones that the Municipal Port Fund and the Port Authority administer together, and the caiques that make the crossing use it. It is a small harbour kept by its own boats, and the last village water before the open gulf.

  5. Elounda Hills

    Elounda Hills is the marina that Mirum Hellas is building into a 138-acre estate above the gulf. Camper & Nicholsons, the yacht company whose name goes back to 1782, is to run its water, and its moorings are to take craft up to superyacht length. It is the first harbour on this coast designed for the visiting vessel rather than the fishing fleet, and until it opens Elounda has a village quay and open water.

Mythology

  1. Kronos

    Apollodorus places the hidden birth of Zeus in a cave of Dicte, where Rhea’s swap of a stone for the baby defeats Kronos. The cave above Psychro on the Lasithi Plateau later came to be identified as the Dictaean Cave, and excavation there has found offerings left in the cave.