The Quiet Islands of the Saronic Gulf

The great islands of the Aegean have their admirers, and their crowds, but the traveller who wants the old, unhurried Greece would do well to look closer to Athens than the guidebooks suggest. Strung across the gulf that opens south of the capital, the islands of the Saronic sit barely an hour or two from the city by boat, and yet they belong to another rhythm entirely. There are no airports here, no long transfers, no sense of a place remade for mass arrival. There is only the slow business of harbour life, and the deep blue water, and the long afternoons.

A different kind of Greek island

What unites the Saronic islands is a quality of restraint. Some are pine-covered and green, others bare and rocky; some are car-free by law, their lanes given over to foot traffic and the occasional working mule; all of them share a scale that keeps them human. You can walk the length of a harbour front in ten minutes, know the café where the fishermen take their coffee by the second morning, and settle into the pace of a place that has never depended on tourism to survive. This is island Greece as it was before the jet, and it is all the more precious for how near it lies to a capital city.

The appeal is the same one that draws the discerning traveller to the quieter corners of any famous archipelago, the instinct to step just off the well-trodden route and find the real thing intact. It is the instinct behind our love of the quiet islands of the Cyclades, and the Saronic offer the same reward with even less effort, being reachable by ferry from the heart of Athens rather than by a further flight.

The pleasures of arriving slowly

Part of the charm of these islands is that you come to them by sea. There is no other way, and it changes the character of the trip entirely. You board a boat in the city, watch Athens fall away behind the wake, and arrive at a harbour that reveals itself gradually as you approach, the whitewashed houses climbing the hill, the masts of the fishing boats, the tables set out along the water. Arrival by ferry has a ceremony to it that arrival by plane has lost, a sense of a journey properly made, and it sets the tone for the unhurried days to come. The Atlantic offers a cooler version of the same pleasure, as our guide to the quiet islands of the Gulf of Gascony describes.

This is travel that rewards patience over speed, and the ferry is not a means to an end but part of the pleasure itself, a truth we celebrate in understanding the appeal of the slow ferry. On the Saronic route the crossing is short, but the principle holds: the boat is where the holiday begins, out on the deck with the wind and the blue.

On these islands the day is measured not by the clock but by the light: the fierce noon that empties the lanes, the long golden evening that fills the harbour tables, the deep dark that brings the cicadas.

A word on when to go, because timing shapes the whole experience. High summer brings heat and the Athenians themselves, who know these islands well and fill the harbour tavernas at weekends; it is lively and hot and not without charm, but it is not the islands at their most peaceful. The shoulder months on either side of summer are the connoisseur’s choice: the sea still warm enough to swim, the light softer, the tavernas unhurried, the walking a pleasure rather than an endurance. Spring brings wildflowers across the hillsides and a green that the parched summer soon burns away; autumn brings warm seas and the golden light that photographers prize. Whenever you come, resist the urge to island-hop too fast. The temptation, with a whole archipelago within reach, is to tick off one island after another, but the Saronic reward the opposite instinct. Choose one island, or at most two, settle in, and let a place become familiar rather than merely glimpsed from the deck of a departing boat.

Days without a plan

The Saronic islands do not offer sights so much as a way of being. A morning might be spent walking a coastal path to a cove reachable only on foot, the sea below impossibly clear, and swimming from the rocks with no one else in sight. An afternoon dissolves into a long lunch under a tamarisk tree, grilled fish and a village salad and a carafe of something cold and resinous, followed by the general surrender of the siesta. The evening is for the harbour, for the slow parade of the waterfront, for watching the boats come in. Much the same unhurried island life can be found much further north, as our guide to the quiet islands of the Gulf of Finland describes.

There is culture here too, for those who want it: a hilltop monastery reached by a stony track, a small museum in a former merchant’s mansion, a church whose bell marks the hours. But nothing is compulsory, and the islands are at their best when you resist the urge to fill the days. The art of doing very little, deliberately and well, is one we return to often, and it is the same spirit that animates the quiet islands of the Aeolian Sea off the Italian coast, another archipelago that rewards the traveller willing to slow right down.

Where to stay, and how

Accommodation on the Saronic islands runs to the human scale of everything else: restored sea captains’ houses turned into small guesthouses, family-run pensions above the harbour, the occasional handsome mansion converted with care into a few rooms. The grand resort has, mercifully, not arrived, and the pleasure of staying here is precisely the pleasure of the small and the personal, a host who knows the island, a breakfast on a terrace above the water, a room with shutters that open onto the blue.

Base yourself in the harbour town of whichever island suits your temperament, the greener and gentler or the barer and wilder, and let the days unfold from there. For the traveller planning a wider Mediterranean itinerary, the Saronic pair naturally with a few days in Athens itself, whose design-minded hotels we survey in understanding the design hotels of Athens, making a city-and-islands trip that balances the urban and the utterly unhurried.

The case for going now

The Saronic islands endure precisely because they have stayed off the main circuit, and the traveller who values that quiet has every reason to go while it lasts. They ask little, an easy ferry, an open mind, a willingness to let the days go slack, and they give a great deal in return: the old Greece, close at hand, unhurried and unspoiled. For more journeys in this unhurried spirit, our Travel & Stays section is full of places that reward the slow traveller.