Grecotel’s Cape Sounio, the 139-key estate set in pine woods above the Temple of Poseidon at the southern tip of Attica, opened a wellness programme in June 2025 that it did not write for itself. Elevations of Wellness was drawn for the resort by Vicky Vlachonis, an osteopath born in Athens and practising in Los Angeles, and it arrived in a spa the estate had rebuilt in the same year’s renovation — the one that also took in the lobby and entrance, the grand seawater pool, and a poolside restaurant with an open kitchen and wood-fired ovens.
The distinction is worth holding. A resort can commission a treatment card in a season. Handing the shape of a wellness practice to a named practitioner, and building it as an ascent the guest climbs rather than a list they order from, is a slower undertaking and a harder one to walk back.
A programme that rises in four levels
Elevations of Wellness is structured in four levels, each written to be reached from the one below it. The first guides the guest into deep relaxation and inner balance. The second turns to rejuvenation and the restoring of energy. The third is described as a deep, integrative approach to healing, harmonising body and mind. The fourth uses gentle yet potent techniques to unlock tension and reset the nervous system.
Set against those levels are the practices Vlachonis brought with her: therapeutic massage, grounding rituals, dry brushing with olive oil, nutrition planned rather than prescribed, guided walks and meditation. The stated ground is the meeting of ancient Greek healing with modern science, and in particular the connection between mind and body and the part digestion plays in both.
The hands behind it
Vlachonis holds a master’s in osteopathy from the European School of Osteopathy and has spent more than 20 years at leading clinics, treating pain through the mind-body connection. Her practice has been kept by Gwyneth Paltrow, Lady Gaga, Nicole Richie and Sir Elton John. She is the author of The Body Doesn’t Lie, and founded the organic olive oil label Saint Supply.
That she is Athenian is not incidental to the commission. The programme was written for a headland she knew before she knew the clinics, and its language — the sea, the pines, the temple on the point — is the language of the ground itself rather than a register borrowed from elsewhere.
Where it is practised
The rebuilt spa holds 4 private massage rooms, 2 of them double and 2 single, and an open-air heated hydrotherapy pool. Beside them stand a fitness room laid out with Technogym equipment, an indoor and outdoor gym facing the sea, a beauty salon, and a deck given to yoga and Mat Pilates. The doors open at 10 in the morning and close at half past 6 in the evening; the therapy pool is reserved for those aged 16 and over. Every signature treatment can also be taken privately, in the room.
The walk to the temple
The programme’s signature gesture leaves the building altogether. It is a guided walk to the Temple of Poseidon, taken with stretching and meditation along the way — a fifth-century BC sanctuary reached on foot rather than viewed from a terrace. The therapy pool carries the same idea in water: a guided swim meditation, or a session set to sunrise, to sunset, or to the full moon.
It is a quiet piece of programming, and a sure one. The resort’s own ground supplies what most spas import — the sea light, the pine, the marble on the point — and the programme’s better hours are the ones that take the guest out into it.
Fifty years, and a third generation
The collaboration was announced as Grecotel marked 50 years. The group was begun by Nikos Daskalantonakis and runs some 40 hotels across 15 Greek destinations; Odyssia Sifounaki-Daskalantonaki, of the founding family’s third generation, set the programme beside the completed renovation as evidence of what the group means to be — personal care and a Greek ethos held together with something new.
Cape Sounio itself argues the same case in its fabric. The main building recalls an ancient temple; the lobby carries a site-specific installation by Nefeli Massia and works by Takis; 8 restaurants and bars are spread through the grounds; the airport lies 40 minutes off, the city 50. It is an estate that has always traded on proximity to one of the most photographed headlands in Greece. What changed in June 2025 is that it stopped treating the headland as a view and began treating it as part of the treatment.
For the guest who would give the question a week on that coast rather than an hour on a table, the house makes the introduction.
