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. Ownership gives less 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. Much of the Greek coast also 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 as much the property 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. It is an exception, not a picture of the market.

What is on the market

The Greek market in private islands is real and small. It is also private in the other sense of the word: it is not conducted in public.

Most of what changes hands 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 let whole rather than sold. Skorpios, in the Ionian, is the one everybody can name. Aristotle Onassis bought it in 1963. His granddaughter Athina Onassis sold it in 2013 to a company connected with the Rybolovlev family. Since then it has been developed into an estate taken by one party at a time, under a cap on guest numbers. People often take it as typical of the category, and it is the exception.

The shoreline is not included

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

Under Greek law the aigialos and the paralia belong to the public domain and are things in common use. The aigialos is the shoreline, and the paralia is the beach behind it. 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.

Every new owner discovers the practical consequence. A boat may anchor off, and people may land on and use the shore. The owner can protect the interior, the buildings and the quiet, but 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. Under Law 1892/1990 it restricts property transactions inside them by buyers from outside the EU and EFTA, the European Free Trade Association. A buyer applies for consent under Article 26. The decision 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. So the further a buyer gets from the mainland, and the closer to the thing they came for, the more likely the purchase is to need consent and the longer it takes.

The route is set out in buying property in Greece as a foreign buyer. On an island the order matters: consent is established before anything else is agreed, because everything else depends on it.

What may be built

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

Natura 2000 is the European Union’s network of protected nature sites. In Greece it 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 limits what may be built and where.

Planning rules for land outside settlement boundaries apply on top. 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 rests on a permission nobody has yet applied for.

What an island runs on

An island comes with none of the services a mainland house relies on. Each one has to be built and kept running.

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. There is no grid. Power comes from generators, increasingly solar with storage, and fuel delivered by sea.
Waste. There is no collection. Waste leaves by boat, and somebody has to make that happen every week.
Access. Arrival is by tender, a small boat that carries people ashore, and the sea decides when it can run. In the Cyclades in August the meltemi, the strong summer wind of the Aegean, sets the timetable. 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 decays quickly, and the salt does most of the damage.

Taking one rather than owning one

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

Three kinds of property are available. There is a handful of whole-island estates. There is a larger number of headland properties that are private in every practical sense without being islands. And there are houses on small islands with few other houses on them. The same people book each of these early and repeatedly, the pattern described in why good Greek villas are not listed online.

The test is what the island is for. Several arrangements deliver seclusion. Ownership itself is a different proposition, and the sections above describe what it costs.