Spetses

Spetses is a two-hour Flying Dolphin from Piraeus, and the rhythm at the centre of town is set by horse-drawn carriages. Cars are banned within the village core, scooters and bicycles are everywhere on the perimeter road, and the carriages do real work taking guests and groceries to and from the hotels. They are not laid on for visitors. Knowing this is the difference between using the island and posing in it.

The heroine of Spetses is Laskarina Bouboulina, who in 1821 fitted out and commanded her own flotilla against the Ottoman fleet during the War of Independence. She bought a corvette of her own, the Agamemnon, and led the blockade of Nafplio. Her grey stone mansion two streets back from the harbour is kept as a museum by her descendants. Each year on 8 September, the Armata festival re-enacts the 1822 burning of an Ottoman flagship in the bay, with fireworks and a wooden ship set alight on the water.

The Poseidonion Grand Hotel on the waterfront, opened in 1914 by the Spetsiot benefactor Sotirios Anargyros, was modelled on the grand seaside hotels of the Riviera and has been carefully restored over the past two decades. It is the architectural anchor of the harbour and the obvious base for guests who want a sense of the older Athenian society register the island has cultivated. John Fowles taught at the Anargyreios School here in the early 1950s, used Spetses as the setting for The Magus, and renamed it Phraxos. The school is the imposing classical building above the harbour.

The interior is pine: a thick canopy of Aleppo pine, partly the result of Anargyros's reforestation programme a century ago, partly natural. Walking and cycling tracks run through it, and the southern coves are reached by water taxi or bicycle. Three nights, in late May, June, or September.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Helicopter from Athens to Spetses, around 35 minutes; Helistar and iFly Air Charters serve the route. There is no airfield; the Piraeus flying dolphin is the other way in, around two hours. Cars are banned in the town, so arrival ashore is by carriage, water taxi or foot.

  2. The address

    Orloff Resort, near the Old Harbour, sits around a classical building that housed the island’s first port authority in 1802. The Orloff Restaurant has held the historic building since 1991. Whitewashed rooms cluster around a pool under olive trees.

  3. The Spetses Museum

    The Spetses Museum, in the mansion of Hatzigiannis Mexis — one of the first leaders of Spetses in 1821 — opened in 1938. The final room holds the Revolutionary flag, Laskarina Bouboulina’s ossuary, weapons, historical documents, and the portraits of the Spetsiot naval fighters. The ground floor keeps the Iria shipwreck finds, from around 1200 BC.

  4. The Florentine ceiling

    The Bouboulina Museum opened in 1991, founded by the heroine’s fourth-generation descendant Philip Demertzis-Bouboulis to save the 17th-century mansion behind the Dapia. The Florentine carved ceiling of the grand salon was the principal reason for the rescue; weapons, letters, and Byzantine icons fill the rooms.

  5. The school

    The Anargyrios & Korgialenios School Foundation keeps the campus open year-round. The classical building above the harbour holds the MAGUS Art Café — named for the John Fowles novel — a renovated library of around 5,000 volumes, conference rooms, and the school’s music academy.

  6. The shipyards

    Just before the Old Harbour, the karnagia — the traditional shipyards — still build and repair wooden caïques as they have since before the Revolution. The Spetsiot yards are unequalled in the Mediterranean for this; the craft passes from one generation to the next, and the same hands that turned out the island’s fighting brigs now lay down keels by eye. Walk the slipways at the water’s edge before the day’s heat.

  7. The lighthouse

    On the promontory that closes the east side of the Old Harbour stands the Spetses lighthouse, among the oldest in modern Greece — established in 1831, in the first years of the independent state, and automated in 1986. The conical masonry tower sits on a low hill above Baltiza; the walk out from the carriage rank at Dapia takes the southern shore the long way round, and the light marks the turn home.

  8. Agia Paraskevi

    Agia Paraskevi, on Spetses’s south coast, is reached by boat or by the daily bus from the town. Pine trees fall to the water; large pebbles below the picturesque chapel that gives the bay its name. The beach is organised — sunbeds, a beach bar — and the road traffic stops at the line of pines.

  9. Zogeria

    Zogeria, on the northern coast about half an hour from the port, is the alternative when the south is busy. A two-part cove of sand and fine pebbles, pine trees reaching the water, sunbeds, showers and a small tavern. Sea taxi from the harbour, or the dirt road around the headland.

  10. The kitchen

    Patralis, at Kounoupitsa, has been the island’s seafood address since 1935 — opened by Uncle Panos the fisherman, now run by his son Vasilis and his grandchildren Argyris and Nikos. Fish soup, astakomakaronada, shrimp saganaki with feta, crayfish, oven-baked lamb. Plain tables on the sea.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The Dapia

    The Dapia is the main port of Spetses, named for the gun battery the islanders held here in the War of Independence — an artificial harbour of two piers where the flying dolphins from Piraeus, the ferries and the sea taxis all come in. The carriage rank waits at the head of the quay; cars are banned in the town, so a guest goes on by carriage, bicycle or foot.

  2. The Old Harbour

    Around the headland southeast of the town lies the Old Harbour, Baltiza — the natural harbour the yachts take, from small cruisers to the largest, with five small piers along it. The karnagia build their caïques at its head and the lighthouse stands on the promontory that closes it; a yacht lies here for the boatyards and the night life, away from the ferry traffic at the Dapia.

  3. Agioi Anargyroi

    Agioi Anargyroi holds the largest sandy beach on the island, on the southwest coast, with the sea cave of Bekiris at one end. The traditional boats run to it from the Dapia through the season, morning to sunset. A yacht lies off the long strand, the pines behind and the cave a swim away, on the quiet side of the island from the town.

  4. Spetsopoula

    Spetsopoula is the small uninhabited island off the southeast coast, one of the islets the municipality of Spetses counts among its own with Falkonera and Velopoula. A yacht passes it rather than calls — the green island across the narrow strait that marks the eastern edge of the Spetses water, the open Argolic gulf beyond.