Porto Heli
Overview
Porto Heli lies on a deep, almost landlocked bay at the south-eastern tip of the Argolid. It is the most sheltered natural harbour on this coast and, for a certain Athenian and international set, the most discreet summer address on the Greek mainland. The town itself is plain. People come for the water, the yachts riding at anchor and the houses set back in the hills.
Amanzoe is the reason the wider world now knows the name. Ed Tuttle conceived it as a modern acropolis: a colonnaded pavilion and a scatter of pool villas on a hilltop above Kranidi, looking across the olive country to the sea and the island of Spetses beyond. A beach club on the coast below, reached by the estate’s own shuttle, has the swimming and the long lunches. Its opening in 2012 drew a quieter, wealthier traveller to a coast that until then had been mostly Greek.
Spetses lies a few hundred metres across the strait, ten minutes by water taxi. It is car-free and neoclassical, and lively in a way Porto Heli is not, which makes it the right evening crossing for dinner in the old harbour. The bay between them is one of the great Saronic anchorages, full of sail through the summer. The marina and the yachting crowd set the town’s particular rhythm.
A hire car opens up the hinterland. Ancient Epidaurus and its theatre, famous for its acoustics, lie about an hour north. Nafplio, Mycenae and Tiryns are within a morning’s reach, and the lemon groves and coves of the Argolic coast run the whole way up. Closer by, the fishing village of Ermioni and the islet of Dokos make easy half-day sails.
Athens is a little over two hours by road, and the airport nearer two and a half. Many guests arrive instead by helicopter, by seaplane or by sea, stepping off a yacht into the bay. Three or four nights let you settle into the pace. Stay longer if Amanzoe and the crossings to Spetses and the islets become the whole of the holiday.
House Notes
The spa
The Greek Spa at Amanzoe covers 2,850 square metres on the hilltop above Porto Heli: seven treatment suites, five indoors and two in the open air, set around a watsu pool, used for massage in warm water, and stone courtyards where water catches the light. The signature ritual takes place in the hammam, where the body is scrubbed with Savon Noir, the black olive-oil soap, before a clay mask.
The grande dame
Across the strait on Spetses, the Poseidonion Grand Hotel has stood on the Dapia seafront since 1914, the Belle Époque building Sotirios Anargyros raised to bring continental glamour to a Saronic island. A long restoration reopened it in 2009 with a Historic Wing and a New Wing, and it was the first hotel in Greece to run a spa. It makes a good end to the evening crossing from Porto Heli.
The sunken sanctuary
The bay at Porto Heli holds a drowned classical city. Halieis was settled late in the 7th century BC and taken over by exiles from Tiryns after Argos razed their town around 460 BC; its Sanctuary of Apollo, with temple, altar and stadium, now lies under water some 500 metres north-east of the old town, with the harbour walls beside it. American teams have worked the site since 1962, and it is best seen with a mask on a calm morning.
The table
Patralis, on the Kounoupitsa waterfront west of the Dapia, is the oldest taverna on Spetses. A fisherman, Panos, opened it in 1935, and it is still in the family, run now by Vassilis and his sons Nikos and Argyris. The fish comes off the day’s boats, and the dish to ask for is lobster spaghetti, eaten at a table a few feet above the water.
Franchthi
Across the water from Porto Heli, on the cape above Koilada bay, the Franchthi Cave holds one of the longest records of human life anywhere. People lived in it from the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age, around 28,000 BC, through the Mesolithic and into the Neolithic, until roughly 3,000 BC; its hunters brought in obsidian from Milos for their blades, and later families fished tuna and made jewellery from shells. The best approach is on foot along the shore to the mouth.
Bouboulina’s mansion
On Spetses, the 17th-century mansion of Laskarina Bouboulina, the shipowner who funded and fought the war of 1821 at sea, is kept as a museum by her own descendants. Philip Demertzis-Bouboulis, four generations down, opened it in 1991 to save the house and its carved Florentine ceiling. The family shows it on its own guided tour.
The oldest wreck
Off the islet of Dokos, near Hydra, lies the oldest known underwater shipwreck: a merchant vessel that went down around 2200 BC with a cargo of Cycladic pottery. Peter Throckmorton came upon it in 1975, and the Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology raised more than 500 clay vases between 1989 and 1992, now held at the Spetses Museum. The story alone is reason to sail round the island.
The karnagia
Round the Spetses shore at the Old Port, the karnagia still stand: open-sided yards where caiques, the traditional wooden boats, are built and mended by hand, with pine planks bent to a curved keel. These same yards built much of the fleet that carried the 1821 revolution, and a handful of shipwrights keep the craft alive. The waterfront is best in the late afternoon, with the hulls drawn up on the slipway.
The marina
Marina Porto Heli sits in the centre of the town, and its shore side is what a guest meets first: a reception office, showers and changing rooms, laundry, provisions carried down to the quay, parking for 60 cars and electric buggies for people and luggage over the last stretch. For a party stepping off a boat, the town begins at the marina gate, and all of it is a short walk away.
The Magus
On a wooded rise behind Spetses town stands the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School, a boarding school built in 1923 on the Eton model, all austerity and narrow metal beds, to educate the country’s future leaders. John Fowles taught English here in the early 1950s and turned the island into Phraxos, the setting of his 1965 novel The Magus. The grounds and the long facade are worth the walk up.
Anchorage Notes
Marina Porto Heli
Marina Porto Heli opened in the summer of 2021 after a four-year build, funded by private investment with the cooperation of the municipality. It has some 840 metres of concrete floating pontoons for vessels of 8 to 55 metres, with electricity and water at every berth. A berth is requested in advance with the vessel’s dimensions, registration, insurance and dates, and the marina says its own water is drinkable but the town’s is not.
The port office
The Hellenic Coast Guard keeps a port office in Porto Heli itself, one of two in the municipality with the office at Ermioni, so the authority for the bay sits in the town. The land at the harbours belongs to the Municipality of Ermionida, which keeps a Municipal Port Fund among its services, at Kranidi, the seat of the municipality, 7 kilometres inland.
Kosta
Kosta is a small harbour 4 kilometres from Porto Heli, on the strait opposite Spetses, and the Municipality of Ermionida counts it among its own. The crossing from here is by water taxi, caique or ferry-boat. It is a landing, not a place to lie: a party going over in the evening uses it instead of the tender (the yacht’s small boat), and it is the shore end of the shortest crossing on this coast.
Ververonda
Ververonda is a bay north-west of the town, with the lagoon of the same name at its head: brackish and still, with a beach at the opening where the two waters meet and where people snorkel. A fish farm worked the lagoon from the time of Kapodistrias and paid the village well, and the lagoon is now listed in CORINE, the European inventory of biotopes (natural habitats). The yacht lies in the bay, and the lagoon is for a swim and a walk.
Agios Aimilianos
Agios Aimilianos is a run of small green-blue coves out along the peninsula from the bay, reached only by boat. Behind them, in the Kranidi lands, stands a settlement of the same name and little else. A yacht spends a morning at anchor here with the tender (the yacht’s small boat) down, and nobody at all is on the shore.
Hinitsa
Hinitsa is a sandy beach between the town and Kosta, and the hotel beside it has organised much of its length. Across the water stands the islet of the same name, which was called Alioussa in antiquity. It suits a day when the guests want a beach with services ashore: the yacht lies off, the tender comes in, and the shore is already arranged.