THE DAPIA AND THE OLD HARBOUR

The heart of the island is Dapia, the main square that opens directly onto the sea. Paved in the classic black-and-white sea pebbles of the Saronic, lined with old cannons and watched over by the Poseidonion Grand Hotel, a Belle Époque palace built in 1914 in the spirit of the Negresco in Nice, it is where the ferries arrive, where the carriages assemble, and where the slow ritual of Spetsiot life plays out at the cafés along the waterfront. The name itself, Dapia, means “fortress”: this was the gun emplacement from which Spetses captains plotted the naval campaigns of 1821, and the cannons set into the pavement are originals. 

A gentle 20-minute east waterfront walk leads to Palio Limani, the Old Harbour, known locally as Baltiza. This is the more atmospheric of the two ports, and arguably the loveliest single stretch on the island. A working boatyard still turns out traditional wooden caïques here on the same slipways used in the eighteenth century, making it the only continuously operating shipyard in Greece since the revolution. Around the curve of the harbour, a string of tavernas and bars sets out tables at the water’s edge. The old stone lighthouse at the harbour mouth, one of the oldest in Greece, is the natural endpoint for a slow evening walk. 

The grandest of all is the Anargyrios Mansion, built in 1904 by Sotirios Anargyros, the Spetsiot tobacco magnate who made his fortune in America and returned to remake his birthplace as a refined resort. The two-storey stone house is decorated, eccentrically, with Egyptian motifs; Anargyros was a serious amateur Egyptologist and named it Neith, after the Egyptian goddess of war and hunting. It was the first reinforced-concrete building on the island. Anargyros also founded, in 1927, the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School, a boarding school modelled on Eton, set in its own pine grove west of town, intended to educate the sons of the Greek bourgeoisie in the European humanist tradition. 

That school is also why Spetses has quiet literary fame. The English novelist John Fowles taught here from 1951 to 1953, and the island became the setting, barely disguised as the fictional Phraxos for his 1965 novel The Magus. Walk the pine paths above Agia Paraskevi today, and the landscape is recognisably Fowles’s: the same dark green pines coming down to the same clear water, the same sense of an island just slightly outside ordinary time. 

BOUBOULINA AND THE ISLAND THAT BEGAN A REVOLUTION

No figure looms larger over Spetses than Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825), the ship-owning widow who became the only woman to hold the rank of admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy, and one of the most consequential commanders of the Greek War of Independence. When the revolution against Ottoman rule broke out in 1821, Bouboulina sailed her flagship, the Agamemnon, with 18 cannons, the largest warship in the Greek fleet, to impose a naval blockade on Nafplion, largely financed from her own fortune. Spetses was the first Greek island to raise the revolutionary flag, on 3rd April 1821, and Bouboulina’s leadership is the reason it did. 

Her former house, a tall stone mansion a short walk inland from the Dapia, is now the Bouboulina Museum, a privately run, family-curated collection of letters, weapons, ship models and personal belongings, opened by her descendants in 1991. Guided tours run throughout the day from March to October in a range of languages and last around 45 minutes. A bronze statue of Bouboulina herself stands on the seafront at the Dapia, looking out over the channel her ships once patrolled. It is one of the most affecting small museum visits in the Aegean, and a useful corrective for anyone who imagines the romance of the Greek revolution as an entirely male affair. 

PINE-FRINGED COVES AND THE SLOW ART OF THE BEACH DAY

The Spetsiot beach is not the bone-white sweep of the Cyclades. The coast here is pine-fringed and almost lagoon-like, with calm green water shading to deep blue and small coves tucked into the wooded shoreline. Most are reached by water taxi, bicycle or scooter from the old town; one of the small pleasures of Spetses is choosing a different beach each morning according to wind and mood. 

On the western side of the island, Zogeria is widely held to be the most beautiful, a sandy crescent at the head of a deeply indented bay, surrounded by pine forest, with a single seasonal taverna and water of a particularly clear green. Nearby, Agii Anargyri is the longest beach on the island: a generous arc of soft sand and shingle in a sheltered cove, with sunbeds, water sports and a path along the cliff to Bekiri Cave, a sea cavern reached through a low fissure in the rock. Just round the headland, Agia Paraskevi is its quieter sister: golden sand, a small chapel above the water, the same pines coming down to meet it. 

On the northern coast, closer to town, Vrelos is the busier weekend beach, a younger crowd, a beach bar with music, while Ligoneri, further round, is a hush of pebbles and pine, the kind of place to bring a book, a bottle of water and some sustenance to keep you here all afternoon.