The Romanos, a Luxury Collection Resort, is on the seafront at Navarino Dunes, Costa Navarino, Pylos, in Messenia. It opened in 2010, the first hotel at Costa Navarino, and the estate has grown outward from it since. The Westin went up beside it. W and Mandarin Oriental came later, across at Navarino Bay.
Costa Navarino is 1,000 hectares across four distinct areas. Captain Vassilis Constantakopoulos (1935 to 2011) began buying parcels of land around Pylos in the late 1990s, after decades at sea and after founding Costamare Shipping in the 1970s. During construction every olive tree that had to be removed was replanted, and some of them were thousands of years old. TEMES S.A., the company he left behind, is 75 per cent Constantakopoulos family and 25 per cent Olayan Group, and his sons Achilles, Konstantinos and Christos run it.
The hotel has 321 rooms, suites and villas, and 128 of them have an infinity pool. Rooms run to 43 sq m and suites to 82 sq m, and the beachfront villas start at 142 sq m. Floors, wall cladding and joinery in the guest rooms are stone and wood, and sliding doors give onto the terraces.
Royal Villa Methoni is 630 sq m, on the edge of the Dunes Beach, with front sea views. Royal Villa Koroni, 660 sq m, is the largest accommodation here: three bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, a 72 sq m private outdoor pool, an indoor lift and a dining room with a table for up to 18 guests.
The hotel’s own mark is a stylised letter of Linear B, the Mycenaean script read off clay tablets at the Palace of Nestor in nearby Pylos.
The spa and the sport
Anazoe Spa stands between The Romanos and The Westin, and the two hotels share it along with much of the rest of the Dunes. It covers 4,000 sq m and holds 21 treatment rooms. Its olive-oil treatments, called oleotherapy, follow practices set down on the Nestor tablets.
Guests of The Romanos play at the Mouratoglou Tennis Center, in the Navarino Dunes area. It has 12 tennis courts, eight of them clay and four hard, with three padel courts, two pickleball courts and one squash court beside them. The coaching follows Patrick Mouratoglou’s own methodology.
The estate holds four 18-hole signature courses, none of them more than 13 km from another. Greece had no signature golf course before the first of them, the Dunes Course here at Navarino Dunes: Bernhard Langer drew it with European Golf Design. The Bay Course, the Hills Course and the International Olympic Academy Golf Course followed it.
The beach and the rest of the Dunes
The Dunes Beach in front of the hotel runs for over 1 kilometre along the Ionian coastline. The Eleon pool, among olive groves, is kept for adults and young adults over 12. Across the wider estate there are more than 40 culinary venues. Guests in the Ionian Exclusive accommodation have a butler on call around the clock, and Navarino Flight Services keeps a privately owned Bell 430 helicopter for passenger flights. The Westin and the Costa Navarino Residences are in Navarino Dunes too.
Who is this for
This suits a traveller who wants sport and quiet in the same week, and families who want the children occupied: the Aqua Park has three water slides and a play pool, and Sandcastle and Cocoon run programmes for children from four months to 12 years. The ground is Messenian, olive hills falling to the Ionian, with Gialova Lagoon nearby and GPX tracks for walking and cycling from Moraitis Outdoors. The Dunes Agora, the estate’s open-air square, holds the shops, the seasonal events and a good share of the tables.
