Porto Heli
Porto Heli occupies a deep, near-landlocked bay at the south-eastern tip of the Argolid, 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; the draw is the water, the yachts riding at anchor, and the houses set discreetly 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 out 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, holds the swimming and the long lunches. Its opening in 2012 drew a quieter, wealthier traveller to a coast that had until then been mostly Greek.
Spetses lies a few hundred metres across the strait, ten minutes by water taxi — car-free, neoclassical, and lively in a way Porto Heli is not, the right evening crossing for dinner in the old harbour. The bay between is one of the great Saronic anchorages, filled with sail through the summer; the marina and the yachting crowd set the town's particular rhythm.
The hinterland rewards a hire car. Ancient Epidaurus and its theatre, still the most acoustically perfect in the world, 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 to hand, the fishing village of Ermioni and the islet of Dokos make easy half-day sails.
Athens is a little over two hours by road, 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 settle the pace — 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 runs to 2,850 square metres on the hilltop above Porto Heli — seven treatment suites, five indoors and two under the open sky, set around a watsu pool and stone courtyards where water catches the light. The signature ritual is taken in the hammam: the body scrubbed with Savon Noir, the black olive-oil soap, before a clay mask. The quiet counterpart to the colonnades.
The grande dame
Across the strait on Spetses, the Poseidonion Grand Hotel has held the Dapia seafront since 1914 — the Belle Époque pile Sotirios Anargyros raised to bring continental glamour to a Saronic island. A long restoration returned it in 2009; it keeps a Historic Wing and a New Wing, and it was the first hotel in Greece to run a spa. The evening crossing from Porto Heli ends well here.
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 — temple, altar, and stadium — now lies under water some 500 metres north-east of the old town, the harbour walls beside it. American teams have worked the site since 1962; a mask and a calm morning read it best.
The table
On the Kounoupitsa waterfront, west of the Dapia, Patralis is the oldest taverna on Spetses — opened in 1935 by a fisherman, Panos, and still in the family, now Vassilis and his sons Nikos and Argyris. The fish comes off the day's boats; the dish to ask for is the 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 carries one of the longest records of human life anywhere — occupied from the Palaeolithic, around 28,000 BC, through the Mesolithic and into the Neolithic, until roughly 3,000 BC. Its hunters were importing obsidian from Milos for their blades; later families fished tuna and made jewellery from shells. The walk along the shore to the mouth is the right approach.
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, and it is shown by the family on its own guided tour.
The oldest wreck
Off the islet of Dokos, near Hydra, lies the oldest shipwreck ever found — a merchant vessel that went down around 2,200 BC with a cargo of Cycladic pottery. Peter Throckmorton came upon it in 1975; the Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology raised more than five hundred clay vases between 1989 and 1992, now held at the Spetses Museum. The story alone is reason to round the island under sail.
The karnagia
Round the Spetses shore to the Old Port and the karnagia still stand — the open-sided yards where caiques are built and mended by hand, pine planks bent to a curved keel. These same yards built much of the fleet that carried the 1821 revolution; a handful of shipwrights keep the craft alive now. The waterfront reads best in the late afternoon, the hulls drawn up on the slipway.
The marina
Porto Heli is one of the great natural harbours of the Argolic coast — a near-enclosed bay, hill-sheltered on every side, that yachts make for in any weather. Marina Porto Heli sits in the heart of the town, with berths for 149 vessels and a settled base for the crossings to Spetses and the islets across the gulf. It is about 65 nautical miles by sea from Athens.
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 school 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 repay the walk up.