Why Folegandros
There are islands in the Cyclades that exist at the exact point of intersection between extraordinary natural beauty and extraordinary human solitude — islands that are genuinely remote, genuinely unspoiled, and genuinely beautiful in the most elemental and most completely Cycladic way, without the softening of infrastructure or the social animation of popularity, in a natural setting of such pure and such concentrated magnificence that they constitute, for those who seek this particular quality of island experience, the most complete and most rewarding destinations in the entire archipelago. Folegandros is this island. Lying west of Ios and south of Sikinos in the southern Cyclades, one of the smallest and most remote of the inhabited Cycladic islands at 32 square kilometres, Folegandros is an island of dramatic cliffs, crystalline water, a Chora of breathtaking beauty perched on the edge of a sheer precipice above the sea, and a quality of natural solitude and authentic island atmosphere that its growing reputation among the most discerning travellers in the Cyclades has thus far left entirely and refreshingly intact.
The island’s landscape is among the most dramatic in the Cyclades — a long, narrow ridge of bare limestone rising steeply from the sea on every side, its cliffs falling sheer on the northern coast in drops of up to 200 metres, and its interior of terraced agricultural land and fragrant phrygana composing a picture of austere Cycladic beauty of great intensity and great clarity. The light on Folegandros — the particular quality of the light, which is cleaner and more precisely defined here than on the larger, more sheltered islands of the group — is one of the island’s most consistently praised and most consistently experienced qualities: a light that makes the colours of the sea and the white of the Chora walls and the gold of the limestone cliffs more vivid and more completely present than anywhere else in the southern Cyclades. It is this light, combined with the island’s extraordinary natural drama and its quality of genuine quiet, that has drawn, over the past two decades, a growing community of writers, artists, and independent-minded travellers who have discovered in Folegandros the particular and increasingly rare quality of the Greek islands at their most essentially and most completely themselves.
The Chora of Folegandros — built on a narrow ridge at the island’s highest point, its houses and churches and the ruins of its Venetian castle overhanging a sheer cliff of 200 metres directly above the sea — is by common consent the most dramatically sited and one of the most architecturally beautiful Cycladic village capitals in the entire archipelago. The combination of the classic Cycladic whitewashed architecture, the extraordinary cliff-edge position, and the views from the village square — the Piazza, where the island’s community gathers in the evenings under the shade of trees that somehow find purchase in the cliff-top soil — over the surrounding Cyclades and the deep blue sea 200 metres below creates a quality of aesthetic and emotional experience that is available, in this combination and at this intensity, nowhere else in the Cyclades.
What to Do and What to See
The Chora
The Chora of Folegandros is the island’s supreme attraction and its most completely overwhelming single experience. Built within and around the walls of a 13th-century Venetian castle — the Kastro, whose outer ring of houses forms the defensive perimeter in the classic fortified village manner — the Chora is a composition of extraordinary natural and architectural beauty: the whitewashed houses and blue-domed churches of the inner village, the arched lanes of the Kastro quarter, the cliff-edge square with its café tables overhanging the precipice, and the Church of the Panagia on the highest point of the ridge, its white form silhouetted against the sky and visible from the sea at a great distance. Walking the Chora — slowly, without a fixed route, following the lanes where they lead — is the most completely and most permanently satisfying single experience on the island.
The Panagia Church and the Procession
The Church of the Panagia on the summit ridge above the Chora is the island’s most venerated religious monument and the object of an annual Easter procession of great beauty — the entire community of the island carrying the icon of the Virgin up the steep path from the Chora to the summit church on Easter Sunday morning in a tradition of great antiquity and great communal significance. The church itself, and the path to it through the terraced agricultural landscape of the island’s interior, constitutes one of the finest short walks in the southern Cyclades.
The Beaches
Folegandros has beaches of great natural quality distributed around its dramatic coastline, each of them accessible by boat from the port of Karavostasis or by the cliff paths that descend from the road. Angali, on the western coast, is the finest and most accessible — a wide beach of pale pebble and brilliant water in a sheltered bay backed by a small settlement of tavernas and rooms. Agios Nikolaos, south of Angali, is quieter and wilder. Katergo, at the southern tip of the island and accessible only by boat, is one of the most dramatic and most completely beautiful beach settings in the southern Cyclades — its pale pebble and extraordinary double-coloured water of turquoise and deep blue enclosed by sheer limestone cliffs of great natural grandeur.
Ano Meria and the Agricultural Interior
The village of Ano Meria at the western end of the island is a linear settlement of exceptional traditional character — a series of farmsteads and small clusters of houses strung along the island’s spine for several kilometres, each with its chapel and its walled garden, composing a picture of traditional Cycladic agricultural life of great authenticity and great quiet. The walk from the Chora to Ano Meria — along the island’s central spine, with the sea visible on both sides in the extraordinary light of the southern Cyclades — is one of the finest walks in the Cyclades.
Why Choose Folegandros
Folegandros is the island for the traveller who wants the southern Cyclades at their most completely elemental — the most dramatic cliff landscape, the most beautiful and most dramatically sited Chora in the group, the finest natural quiet, and the most complete and most genuinely satisfying experience of the Cycladic island ideal in a destination that the mainstream of international tourism has not yet reached in sufficient volume to dilute. It is for those who want what the Cyclades were before they were famous, and who are willing to accept the modest inconveniences of remoteness — fewer services, fewer options, fewer people — in exchange for a quality of natural beauty and authentic island atmosphere that is available, at this level of completeness and this level of purity, on very few islands remaining in the Aegean
