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The Emerald Isle: Corfu
December 23, 2009 by Fractional & Shared Ownership Property News & Reviews · Leave a Comment
Italian architecture, British heritage, a Greek soul and an independent spirit make Corfu an island of contrasts. Like Mallorca, it’s stuck with the “bargain vacation” tag. But head north and you’ll see the island in a whole new light if you just take the time to explore the Corfu you never knew.
Ah, the Greek islands. Six thousand of them, with only 220 inhabited. The ones we’ve heard of are packed in summer, the ones we haven’t remain unmarked by the footprints of tourism (too small, too barren, too remote).
The classic image of a Greek island, like Mykonos, is cube-shaped white houses sprinkled over a sunbaked landscape that leads down to a small port in a shimmering blue sea. White and blue, the colors of the Greek flag. But look at a map of the islands and pan left, towards Corfu, and the colors change. No parched golden landscape, no sugar lump houses.
The hills are alive in Corfu and they’re green – bursting with Technicolor wildflowers and dotted with farmhouses
and millionaires’ mansions. Corfu is almost as green as Ireland in winter, but the landscape is much more Tuscany. It’s not just the cypresses and the four-and-a-half million olive trees that look Italian; it’s the taste of Italy that lingers
in taverna kitchens and the beautiful but decaying Venetian-style buildings of Corfu Town that reflect its Italian heritage. The Venetians ruled Corfu and her five sister islands from 1386 (when they became a prized part of Venice’s maritime empire because of their strategic position) until its collapse in 1797 (and Corfu is still a main cruise and ferry gateway to Italy).
They paid the Corfiots well for cultivating olives, which explains the number of olive groves.
The quickest way to separate vacation-coach Corfu from the real Corfu is to draw a line across the island.Kavos, party central, is right down south; Kerkyra (Corfu Town) is in the middle, on the east coast; and the quiet parts, where elegant mansions look down on to tiny bays where you’d be lucky to find a fish taverna, never mind a mini-market, tend to be on Corfu’s northeast and north-west coastlines.
Away from the beaches, the interior of Corfu is extraordinary considering its size. The gods blessed it with a diversity of scenery, like an island with a dozen “stage sets”: the bare limestone mountains of the island’s massive peak, Mount Pantokrator, which you can paraglide off; forests and olive groves; inland wetlands, river valleys and gorges; curiously-formed cliffs that drop straight down to a see-through sea.
Each beach is different from the next: swathes of endless sand, dotted with sun-loungers … rocky coves leading to a secret beach … a small forest opening out on to a horseshoe bay. This is the Corfu most vacations don’t reach, and
deep inland lie the tiny Corfiot villages that most visitors don’t see. A handful of houses (too small for a church), with green shutters closed against the sun, where a wild dog tethered to a gate barks at a passerby.
Somewhere in the distance, an old Greek radio crackles with intermittent music. These mini villages are so far (by foot) from Corfu Town that it might as well be in another country and you can’t help but wonder how they got there in the first place.
Getting to know “the real Corfu” just requires a bit of advance planning. There are three good ways to explore the island, avoiding the touristy parts: driving round the north coast by car; taking in Corfu Town by foot; and the Corfu Trail. Not for the faint-hearted, the Corfu trail is more of a journey than a trail, more hiking than walking. You cover more than 120 miles of pure island scenery, from the white cliffs near Arkoudillas (at Corfu’s southernmost tip) to the wild, northern point of Cape Agia Ekatirini. For an alternative Greek island vacation, there’s nothing like it.
The Trail takes in beauty spots, beaches and monasteries, and is easier during the low to midseason when there’s less chance of the heat haze obscuring the views and no likelihood of a heat wave. If you’re brave enough to tackle it in one attempt, the entire trail will take a good walker about ten days to complete, but parts of it can be covered by bus. Most
walkers start down south and head north, for two reasons: firstly, the landscape becomes progressively more fascinating the further north you go; and secondly, it’s easier on the eyes, as you don’t have the sun in your eyes as much as if you were walking north to south.
If combining time by the pool with a little urban exploration is more your thing, Corfu Town is a lovely place to get lost in. Large enough to be cosmopolitan, small enough to be easy to explore, it’s a labyrinth of secret squares and fountains, plus a plethora of churches, pharmacies, mobile phone shops, tavernas, souvenir shops and boutiques that line the streets. Find a shaded table for a pre-lunch drink at the French-style Liston – a stylish, bustling ancient arcade where ladies sip coffee as their dachshunds snooze under the table – before you wander through town in search of lunch. At the Liston, you can order a ginger beer, called tsin tsin birra by the locals and this “hangover” from the British protectorate era is still made fresh with grated ginger, lemon juice, lemon oil, water and sugar.
Equally British is the famous cricket ground in the Esplanade, although part of the pitch has been given up for parking spaces so now there’s a new cricket ground at Gouvia Marina where Corfu’s 11 cricket teams play.
If Corfu has an artistic feel, it’s because the 18th century was a vibrant time in the island’s cultural history. Corfu Town once had 15 philharmonic orchestras and artistic pursuits bloomed, as painters, writers and musicians shaped the city’s social tapestry. In 1807 it was reclaimed by France, then came a period of British rule, when the island was placed under Great Britain’s exclusive protection from 1815 onwards, after Napoleon’s treaty with the Russians, and it wasn’t until 1864 that Britain relinquished Corfu and the other Ionian Islands when they became part of the modern Greek state.
Heading north-east, away from Corfu Town, you’ll discover some of the least-known parts of the island, where unpaved tracks lead to smart villas. At Kassiopi, one-and-a-half miles off the Albanian coast, your mobile suddenly loses the Greek signal and switches to an Albanian network. It’s here that you realize how close Corfu is to Albania and after a boat trip to Butrint, Corfu feels like California by the time you get back. Despite the scenery, Albania is plagued with unfinished roads and evident poverty, both of which are part of everyday life there. When an Albanian looks across at Corfu at night it must seem like Kerkyra’s glittering lights are made of gold.
As in life, step off the beaten track and life usually gets more interesting, and Corfu rewards her explorers well. A quick detour away from the busy resorts on the south coast and you’ll soon be in Homer’s “rich and beautiful land.”
By Fiona Pernice
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