In 1963 Yiannis Carras bought a bay from a Mount Athos monastery and set about building a self-contained resort with its own marina, golf course and vineyard. Half a century on, Tom Pettit finds the parts of the dream that have aged best.
There are hotels, and then there are places like Porto Carras, which is less a hotel than a small principality. The story goes that Yiannis Carras, a Greek shipping magnate, was sailing off the Sithonia peninsula in 1963 when he spotted an untouched bay and decided he would build a resort on it. He bought 1,763 hectares from the Monastery of Saint Gregory, one of the Mount Athos monasteries on the neighbouring finger of Halkidiki, planted vines and 45,000 olive trees, and between 1974 and 1980 opened the hotels. The estate’s own history credits the vision to Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and the guestbook from those years reads like a dinner party you would have wanted an invitation to: Salvador Dalí, François Mitterrand, Melina Mercouri, Johnny Hallyday.
Today the main event is the Meliton, a big, terraced 1970s hotel that sits on the bay looking across the water to the fishing town of Neos Marmaras, with a marina at one end, a beach along the front and the pine-covered mountains of Sithonia rising behind. Opposite, the estate’s other hotel of the same vintage stands wrapped in scaffolding, mid-renovation, which tells you something about where the new owners’ ambitions lie. The setting is the first thing you notice and the last thing you forget. The sea is startlingly clear, the hills roll straight down to the sand, and the evening light does the kind of thing to the bay that makes you reach for your phone and then put it away again, because it will not do it justice.
It is worth being straight about what Porto Carras is and is not. This is a large, family-oriented resort with a proper kids’ club and a full roster of children’s activities, and in high season it feels that way. The interiors are also where the fifty years show most. Everything is clean and comfortable and works as it should, but the look is a generation behind the newer Aegean resorts, and anyone expecting stripped-back Cycladic minimalism should recalibrate before arriving. If you want the version of Porto Carras that comes closest to a luxury stay, book at the suite tier. That buys you a private stretch of beach and access to Crystals, the suite-only restaurant overlooking the marina, and it changes the experience considerably.
Because the food here is brilliant, and I do not use the word lightly. Breakfast and dinner in the main restaurant are buffet style, which on paper is not the most glamorous format going, but in practice everything is freshly cooked, generous and very well made. Fried calamari, courgette fritters, dolmadakia, a properly dressed Greek salad, a vegetable moussaka good enough to convert a carnivore. Cikado, the seaside restaurant down on the beach, is the pick of the estate for a long lunch or dinner: a handsome, breezy spot where the table is more or less on the sand. Crystals, for suite guests, is the polished option, all marina views and quieter service. The wine list leans, as it should, on the estate’s own bottles, and whoever programmes the restaurant playlist deserves a pay rise.
For a good many Oracle Time readers the golf will be the clincher. Greece has remarkably few courses and this 18-hole layout is one of the best of them: open, forgiving and gettable for the mid-handicapper, with the sort of mountain backdrops that make you forgive a three-putt. The clubhouse is a good one too, the kind of place you find yourself lingering in for an hour after the round with a cold Mythos and no particular plan.
Then there is the Domaine. Carras planted his first vines in 1965 and the estate now farms 450 hectares of organic vineyard on the slopes above the resort, which by its own account makes it the largest organic vineyard in Greece and one of the biggest in Europe. The Slopes of Meliton appellation, granted PDO status in 1982, exists essentially because of this place. A tasting at the winery, working through indigenous Greek varieties alongside the Cabernet that first made the estate’s name, is one of the best afternoons on the peninsula and a strong argument for going half board and drinking well.
What ties the whole thing together is the staff. From the waiters at Cikado to the marina team to the pro shop, everyone we met was warm, unhurried and unfailingly kind, which counts for a great deal in a resort of this size. There is live music in the lobby in the evenings and a marina to wander after dinner, and you get the sense that a lot of the people working here have been doing so for a long time and rather like the place.
Porto Carras is not the slick new-build luxury of a Mykonos beach club and it does not pretend to be. It is a fifty-year-old utopian project you can still sleep inside, a little frayed at the edges in places, but with a vineyard, a golf course, a beach and a kitchen that have all aged rather beautifully. Come for the golf and the food, book the suite, and use it as a base for exploring Sithonia, which, as we will be writing about at length, is one of the most underrated corners of Greece.
Porto Carras Grand Resort, Neos Marmaras, Halkidiki, Greece. Rates vary by season. portocarras.com | Images courtesy of Porto Carras Grand Resort
