From Andros: The Island with the Split Personality
By Diana Farr Louis
Andros is rimmed with some of the best beaches in the Aegean. And you don’t have to look hard to find them. Golden sands and turquoise sea greet you as soon as you leave Gávrion for Batsí, and almost all of them are as yet unsullied by umbrellas, cantinas, and jet skis. Overlooking one spacious strand is the Perrakis Hotel, one of the island’s best; across the road from another, Yiannouli’s taverna has been serving exuberant lunches to the sunburnt and salt-encrusted for well over thirty years.
Batsí, the tourist centre of the island, is about 10 minutes from Gávrion , 30 from Andros Town. Here are concentrated most of Andros’s hotels, rooms, cafes, restaurants, jewelry stores, bars and just about all its nightlife. Naturally, most visitors, foreign and Greek, end up here. True, they don’t have much choice, given the paucity of accommodation elsewhere, but Batsí is lively and appealing, its older section arranged on steps around the square and above the fishing port. Its tamarisk-lined town beach is still clean and inviting.This is where one goes to be frivolous; elsewhere Andros comes across as a “serious” island.
One of the glories of Andros is the drive from Batsí to the crossroads where you turn inland for the Hora. It runs high above the coast, carved out of the side of Mt. Petalon, past slopes meticulously sculpted into green terraces, each contained within elaborate stone walls, watered by springs plummeting from sheer cliffs. Beneath the cypress clusters, lemon groves, and pocket-sized wheat fields at Paleopolis, the curve of an ancient jetty can be distinctly seen under the azure waves. I’ve never counted but they say 1,039 steps will take you down to examine it more closely. Shards from Geometric to Roman times litter the stony shore here. Dirt roads lead to other, less taxing beaches.
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The slopes opposite the Panachrantos monastery on the way to Hora conceal the homes of Andros’s famed shipowners and sea captains amidst a tangle of trees unmatched in the Aegean. A peaked roof here, a blaze of bougainvillea there, a broad verandah, and lots of high walls poke through the greenery, whetting the imagination but unveiling no secrets. Leaving the main road at Ménites, where springs pour, bubble and dance from rocks and fountains, will put you onto a winding lane that passes through Strapouriés and Steniés (rumoured to be the wealthiest village on the island) for enticing glimpses of gracious living. Between the two, at Apikia, the streams rush into a bottling plant and emerge as Sariza mineral water for export to Athens supermarkets.
From here you can see the Hora, jutting out into the sea, flanked by its two long beaches. Though it has been there since the Venetians wrenched Andros from the Byzantines in the early 13th century, only the wreck of their castle at the tip is that old. Most of the town is decorous neoclassical from the late 19th-early 20th century. Its wide, carless main street, paved with grey marble slabs, is lined with buildings donated by the old families -- to house the old, educate the young, preserve archives and exhibit art. For all its wealth, Andros Town is bourgeois and sedate rather than sophisticated or ostentatious. This is no Cannes or Newport or even Mykonos; there is no conspicuous display of wealth, few shops seeking to part you from your money. So after you’ve seen the exhibitions, have an ouzo in the plateia, and then go back to the wild, untamed (northwestern half of) Andros. This split personality gives you a bargain, two islands for the price of one.
For more insights into Andros past and present, look at the guidebook and article excerpts on this site or the two pieces you can read on the Athens News website (www.athensnews.gr /search Diana Farr Louis/Andros) or in my book, Athens and Beyond, 30 Day Trips and Weekends, published by the Athens News in 2003 and available from them, www.amazon.co.uk or www.greeceinprint.com (which is based in New Jersey).