Can you buy or take a private island in Greece?

Private Islands, and What One Does Not Include

Yes, and the market is small and quiet. Privately owned islands and islets exist in both the Aegean and the Ionian, and a handful are let whole rather than sold. What ownership conveys is narrower than the phrase implies. The shoreline of a private island is public domain like every other shoreline in Greece and cannot be closed. Most islands sit in designated border areas, so a buyer from outside the EU needs consent. And much of the Greek coast lies inside Natura 2000, which restricts what may be built.

In short

Islands and islets are bought and sold in Greece, and a small number are let whole.
The shoreline of a private island belongs to the public domain under the same law as every other Greek beach. It cannot be owned, sold or closed.
Most Greek islands sit within designated border areas, so a buyer from outside the EU and EFTA needs consent under Law 1892/1990.
Natura 2000 covers 446 sites in Greece, about 27% of the land area and more than 19% of its seas, and designation restricts what may be built.
An island has no grid, no mains water and no waste collection unless a previous owner built them. Those systems are the property, as much as the house is.
Skorpios, bought by Aristotle Onassis in 1963 and sold by his granddaughter in 2013, is the one Greek private island most people can name — and the exception rather than the market.

What is actually on the market

The Greek private island market is real, small and almost entirely private in the other sense of the word: it is not conducted in public.

Most of what changes hands is not an island in the imagined sense. It is an islet — a few dozen hectares of rock and scrub with a landing place, no buildings and no services. A minority are developed, with a house, a harbour and generators, and those come to market perhaps once in a decade.

A separate and even smaller group is not for sale at all but is let whole. Skorpios, in the Ionian, is the one everybody can name: bought by Aristotle Onassis in 1963, sold in 2013 by his granddaughter Athina Onassis to a company connected with the Rybolovlev family, and developed since into an estate taken by one party at a time under a cap on guest numbers. It is the exception that people mistake for the category.

The shoreline is not included

This is the rule that changes the meaning of the word “private”, and it is absolute.

Under Greek law the aigialos and the paralia — the shoreline and the beach behind it — belong to the public domain and are things in common use. They cannot be owned, sold, acquired by long possession or closed off. Nothing about an island changes that. The land above the shoreline may be owned outright; the strip the sea reaches cannot.

The practical consequence is the one every new owner discovers. A boat may anchor off, and people may land on and use the shore. What is protected is the interior, the buildings and the quiet — not the water’s edge. The rules are set out in full in the Greek shoreline and who may use it.

Greek law designates border areas and restricts property transactions inside them by buyers from outside the EU and EFTA, under Law 1892/1990. Consent is applied for under Article 26, and it turns on the vote of the Ministry of National Defence representative on the committee that decides.

That control was designed with frontiers in mind, and an island in the eastern Aegean is a frontier. The result is that the further a buyer gets from the mainland — which is to say, the closer to the thing they came for — the more likely the transaction is to need consent, and the longer it takes.

The route is set out in buying property in Greece as a foreign buyer. The point specific to islands is one of sequence: consent is established before anything else is agreed, because everything else depends on it.

What may be built

Ownership of land in Greece is not permission to build on it, and on islands the gap between the two is at its widest.

The Natura 2000 network in Greece runs to 446 sites, covering around 27% of the country’s land area and more than 19% of its seas. Coastal and island habitats are heavily represented, and designation constrains what may be built and where.

Planning rules outside settlement boundaries apply on top, and so does the archaeological service, which has an interest in a surprising proportion of Greek ground. An island bought on the assumption that a house will follow is a purchase resting on a permission nobody has yet applied for.

What an island actually runs on

The romance of an island is the absence of everything. The cost of an island is also the absence of everything.

Water. There is no mains supply. An island runs on a desalination plant, on stored rainwater, or on a boat that brings water, and each of those has to be built, maintained and staffed.

Power. No grid. Generators, increasingly solar with storage, and fuel delivered by sea.

Waste. No collection. It leaves by boat, and somebody has to make that happen every week.

Access. A tender ride from somewhere, in a sea that decides. In the Cyclades in August the meltemi sets the timetable, and a landing place that works in a calm week may be unusable for 3 days at a stretch.

People. Everything above needs somebody living with it. An unstaffed island degrades quickly, and the salt does most of the work.

Taking one rather than owning one

For most briefs the letting market answers the question better than the sale market does, and it answers it without a decade of maintenance attached.

What is available is a handful of whole-island estates, a larger number of headland properties that are private in every practical sense without being islands, and houses on small islands with few other houses on them. Each of these is committed early and repeatedly to the same people — the pattern described in why good Greek villas are not listed online.

The honest test is what the island is for. If it is seclusion, several arrangements deliver it. If it is the fact of ownership, that is a different proposition, and the sections above are the price of it.