In May 2025 Parīlio announced the largest change to the hotel since it opened in 2019: an enlarged Elios Spa and 13 new villas and suites, both of which opened in June 2025. The property stands at Kolympithres on the northern shore of Paros, below Naoussa, and now has 46 suites and villas in all. For six years it had been known as a design hotel. After the 2025 season, it was known for wellness too.
What opened at Kolympithres
The spa is the quieter half of the news, and the more important one. Elios at Parīlio has four treatment rooms, each with its own shower and changing area, an outdoor heated jacuzzi, and a terrace for relaxing. The treatments draw on the natural resources of the Cyclades, with facial and body work based on the Aegean islands instead of a brand’s standard menu. The rooms are open from 10am to 7pm. The fitness centre beside them, with Technogym treadmills, elliptical trainers, rowing and cycling machines, is open around the clock and free for hotel guests.
Four treatment rooms is a small number for a hotel of 46 keys, and that is the point. A spa sized to fill itself has to be sold to guests. A spa sized below its hotel is free when a guest wants it, which is what makes it feel like a luxury instead of an amenity.
The group’s signature
Elios means the sun, and the name was not invented for Paros. Every Empiria Group hotel has an Elios Spa and fitness centre, which the group describes as a sanctuary for relaxation and purposeful wellbeing. At Vedema on Santorini, it is in a wine cellar a century old. What Kolympithres gained in 2025 was the group’s house standard, built at last at the scale the property had grown into.
The history behind it is unusually direct. Antonis Eliopoulos bought a neoclassical mansion in the Santorini village of Megalochori in 1989 and a winery the year after. Vedema, the first hotel, opened in 1993. With Kalia Konstantinidou, he grew the group across the Cyclades. It traded as Kanava Hotels and Resorts until 2023, when it took the name Empiria Group at its thirtieth anniversary. Parīlio, in 2019, was the group’s first address away from Santorini. The hotel calls Paros a gateway to the real Cyclades.
The 13 new villas and suites
The new suites and villas differ in how much space a guest wants around them. Eclipse and Iris are the signature suites, with one and two bedrooms, each with a private terrace and a shared plunge pool. Aurelia is a villa with three bedrooms, a private infinity pool and a full kitchen. Jupiter, with five bedrooms, is the largest retreat on the property, with a kitchen, an infinity pool and open-air rooms for the kind of gathering a hotel suite cannot hold. All of them come with full hotel service. That is the harder part to deliver, because privacy is easy to build and expensive to staff.
The interiors are by Interior Design Laboratorium, the Athens studio that has worked across the group’s hotels and designed Vedema, Mystique, Istoria, Cosme and Parīlio itself. It kept the style the hotel already had: local stone, wood and stonewashed concrete, with Cycladic restraint built into the rooms themselves. Ecoscapes designed the gardens, planting native species to reduce watering, and the plan includes a private water well so the property can supply its own water.
Paros
Paros has spent a decade gaining the kind of hotels that Mykonos and Santorini gained a generation earlier, and with less noise. Empiria now has three properties on the island, Parīlio, Cosme and Acron Villas, which shows a settled view of where the Cyclades are going. The kitchen at Parōn was refreshed in the same season under executive chef Thanos Feskos.
The spa is the part to watch. A spa gives guests a reason to stay a second week, and a reason for a family to take a five-bedroom villa instead of two suites for four nights. Parīlio spent 2025 building that reason, and the villas will be judged against it.
Who is this for
Parīlio suits families and small groups who want room of their own and a spa close by. The spa sits apart from the activity of the hotel, in warm browns and greys. Its dry-stone courtyard holds a shallow turquoise pool against pale granite boulders, with woven sofas under a reed canopy. The main pool lies between two tall Norfolk Island pines, in front of whitewashed cubic buildings. Down on the shore at Kolympithres, the wind has shaped the pale granite rocks above shallow turquoise water.
