There are islands in Greece that almost no one writes about — and then there is the Peloponnese, which is almost as little written about, and is not an island at all. An arm of land reaching south from Athens, pinched in the middle, olive groves and stone villages and coves most travellers will never find. We have been sending clients here quietly for years.
Our favourite approach begins in the Messenian south. A single stone house above a cove, a private cook, a car, and a week. The tangerine groves come down to the sea in these parts, and the villages on the hills above keep the same rhythm they have kept for centuries. A morning at the ancient site at Messene, a long afternoon on a small boat, a supper at a taverna where the fish was caught at four.
From Messenia, those with two weeks move up into the Mani, the most beautiful of the Peloponnesian peninsulas and one of the most austerely lovely places in Europe. Tower houses of stone, an empty coast road, and a handful of small hotels that work precisely because they refuse to be more than they are.
Further east, the coast of Laconia and the small island of Elafonissos give a last quieter chapter before returning up through Nafplio — a town we think one of the most handsome in the Mediterranean — and back to Athens.
A private Peloponnese week, or fortnight, is for travellers who want Greece without the postcard, and who do not mind a drive on a narrow road if the road ends somewhere worth being. We recommend late May through early July, when the jasmine is at its strongest and the heat has not yet settled, and again in early September once the worst of the summer has passed.
It is, if we are honest, one of the journeys we design for ourselves.
