IF you live in the frenetic urban sprawl that is Athens you will probably have strong ideas about what you want from a holiday. Somewhere with no noise, perhaps. And no traffic fumes.
Oh, and no congestion. And definitely no crowds of foreign tourists. I suspect you’ll have had your fill of ancient monuments, too .
. . Lucky Athenians, then, that the perfect holiday destination is .
. . just 45 minutes away on the hydrofoil.
Welcome to Agistri, a pretty, forest-covered little island that is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dot in the Saronic Gulf. At the height of the summer, Agistri is where Greek families go to escape the stifling heat of Athens. But visit out of season, as we did early last October, and you will have the place to yourself — and great weather too.
Agistri may be that rare thing, a Greek island that still offers a taste of the much-cliched “real Greece”. It is small, welcoming and ordinary in the best sense of that word. There are no millionaires’ yachts in the tiny harbours and no airport bringing in thousands of package holidaymakers.
The cruise ships that jam Santorini and Mykonos sail straight past it to and from Piraeus, the Greek capital’s port. Agistri, just five square miles, may well be Greece’s greenest island, too, thanks to its forest and the abundance of flowers and olive groves, and it is still fairly undeveloped. It has just three tiny villages with a smattering of hotels and apartments, nice clean beaches (some of them pebbly) with .
