Why Spetses
There are islands in the Saronic Gulf that have built their identity around a single, defining quality so successfully and so completely that the quality and the island have become, in the Greek collective imagination, essentially synonymous. Spetses has built its identity around elegance — a particular kind of ease and sophistication, a combination of architectural grandeur, natural beauty, traditional atmosphere, and the particular quality of an island community that has been attracting the most discerning visitors from Athens and from the wider world for well over a century, and that has been shaped by that sustained attention into something rarer and more consistently pleasurable than mere fashionability: a genuine island of genuine beauty with a genuine community life that continues to function with the quiet confidence of a place that knows precisely what it is and sees no reason to be anything else. The island of Spetses lies at the southernmost point of the Saronic Gulf, 80 nautical miles from Piraeus, its wooded hills and magnificent neoclassical mansions rising from the sea in a silhouette of great natural and architectural beauty — the most southern and the most distant of the Saronic islands, and by the consensus of those who know the gulf well, the most aristocratic and the most completely beautiful.
Like Hydra, Spetses restricts motor vehicles — though less absolutely, private cars being banned from the main coastal roads and the historic centre while the island’s network of unpaved interior paths is served by horse-drawn carriages and bicycles, giving the island a quality of traditional atmosphere and natural quiet entirely characteristic of its identity. The horse carriages of Spetses — their horses decorated with flowers and their drivers in traditional costume in the height of summer — are among the most iconic and most immediately charming features of any Saronic island, their clip-clop rhythm on the stone paving of the harbour front one of the most completely characteristic and most completely pleasant sounds in the Saronic world. The scent of jasmine, which flowers in profusion on the island’s hedges and garden walls throughout the summer, mingles with the pine forest and the sea salt in a combination of natural fragrance entirely characteristic of Spetses — an island whose pleasures engage, with unusual completeness, all five senses simultaneously.
The maritime history of Spetses parallels that of Hydra in many respects — a seafaring community of great energy and great commercial ambition that converted its merchant fleet to naval use in 1821 and made a contribution to the Greek War of Independence of the first rank. Laskarina Bouboulina — the Spetsiot sea captain who led her own fleet into battle against the Ottomans and became one of the most celebrated heroines of the independence struggle — remains the island’s most famous daughter and most vivid historical personality, her house in the old harbour now a museum of compelling historical interest and great personal vitality.
What to Do and What to See
The Old Harbour and Dapia
The Dapia — the main harbour of Spetses — is the social heart of the island, its broad quayside lined with the cafés and restaurants whose tables are occupied from morning to midnight and animated with the particular energy of an island whose visitors are, by the self-selection that its distance from Piraeus and its reputation for elegance ensure, among the most socially engaged and most consistently well-dressed in the Saronic Gulf. The Old Harbour, a short walk from Dapia, is the more historically significant and the more architecturally beautiful of the two — a deep, sheltered natural harbour surrounded by the pebble mosaic of its quayside and the magnificent neoclassical mansions of the sea captains who made the island’s maritime fortune, its atmosphere of historical grandeur and natural beauty giving it a quality entirely its own among Saronic harbours.
The Bouboulina Museum
In the old harbour district, the house of Laskarina Bouboulina — restored and opened as a private museum by her descendants — is one of the most compelling and most personally vivid small museums in the Saronic islands. The house preserves the furnishings, personal effects, and historical documents of the island’s most celebrated heroine in a setting that communicates, with unusual immediacy, the character and the courage of a woman who was entirely extraordinary by any historical standard. Guided tours by members of the Bouboulina family add a personal dimension to the historical experience of entirely unique quality.
The Mansions and the Pebble Mosaics
The old harbour district of Spetses preserves the finest concentration of neoclassical sea captains’ mansions in the Saronic islands — large, dignified, architecturally accomplished houses of the late 18th and early 19th centuries whose grey stone and ochre plaster facades line the lanes of the old quarter in a townscape of exceptional historical quality. The pebble mosaics of the harbour — intricate black and white compositions in marble chips covering the courtyards and the harbour front in a tradition of decorative craftsmanship unique to Spetses — are among the most beautiful examples of traditional Greek outdoor decorative art, their geometric and narrative compositions laid with a precision and a vitality that gives the public spaces of the island a visual richness entirely characteristic of the island’s cultural ambitions.
The Forests and Beaches
Spetses is the most wooded island in the Saronic Gulf — its interior covered by a dense forest of Aleppo and maritime pine that descends in several places to the shore and gives the island’s coastline a quality of natural beauty and natural fragrance entirely characteristic of its identity. The beaches distributed around its 24-kilometre coastline range from the organised and accessible near Dapia to the wild and completely natural on the western and southern coasts — Agia Paraskevi, Agioi Anargyri, Agia Marina, Zogeria — each with its own character and each accessible by water taxi, horse carriage, or bicycle from the main harbour.
Why Choose Spetses
Spetses is the island for those who want the Saronic Gulf at its most elegant and most historically rich — the finest neoclassical architecture, the most beautiful old harbour, the most compelling historical personality in Bouboulina, the finest pebble mosaics, the most fragrant forests, and the particular quality of an island that has been a destination of discernment and sophistication for long enough to have developed, in every aspect of its hospitality and its community life, the confidence and the ease of a place entirely accustomed to receiving visitors of the first quality and entirely capable of meeting their expectations.
