Corfu Has It All, Or Almost: the Lush Green Island of Intense History and Heavenly Beaches Is Still Missing This
Green hillsides, shimmering blue sea, but for reasons hard to unpack truly exceptional accommodation options remain limited
Corfu, like some other islands we know, presents a dilemma: interesting history, natural splendor, good beaches, and a dearth of truly exceptional world-class accommodations.
Note the insertion of the word “truly.” Corfu no doubt has its fair share of fine seaside resorts — but a room with a view of the Mediterranean and good rating on TripAdvisor doesn’t confer Greek Column-caliber cosmopolitanism on a given property.
The disappointment starts with Corfu Town, where an intense search for just one world-class boutique hotel turned up the following results: zero. Sadly, the center of “classic:” old Corfu — the tangle of streets situated between the two old Venetian fortresses — is devoid of a single great hotel. Instead, you’ll find a few middling hotels and an avalanche of Airbnbs — and frankly we perceive Airbnb for what it is, a wrecker of communities not only in California, where the insipid, under-regulated company is based, but around the world.
At least in a city like Venice, dozens of charming boutique hotels coexist alongside Airbnb options. That’s what makes the general tourist excess more bearable. It’s not clear why Corfu comes up so short in this department, but if you look around for something sophisticated like the Poseidonion Grand Hotel in Spetses, you’ll have to rely on your imagination.
Is it the Santorini curse? On that Greek island of course, like Mykonos, the cup runneth over with dazzling hotels of all shapes and sizes. But does the overflow there have to spell a deficit of decent options elsewhere?
It does not. Your chief Greek Columnist took a walk around Corfu Town’s Palace of St. Michael and St. George. The former residence of the British Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands looks as out of place on a Greek island now as it must have in 1824 when it was finished. But its neoclassical design gives it the patina of faded grandeur, and the garden setting is nice. Today, inexplicably, the former palace houses a museum of Asian art. On a Greek island, no less. You don’t have to be a real estate developer to realize that the site would be better served, and serve travelers better, as a hotel.
Elsewhere around the island too, if you go looking for the Corfiot equivalent of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo, or something Le Sirenuse along the Amalfi Coast, you’re just not going to find it. I inspected the area around some well-known properties north of the town on Corfu’s eastern, Albania-facing coast. The problem is that the more beautiful coast is the western, Italian-facing one. But there is a paucity of great places to stay. Proximity to the sea and a big swimming pool isn’t enough. In fact, if you’re a hotel on a Mediterranean island, why do you even need a pool at all?
At this point it must also be said that once you get outside of Corfu Town, the outskirts of it are exceedingly ugly. I found myself in a traffic jam on a road near the airport and it wasn’t even Easter yet — I shudder to think what some of those narrow roads look like in July.
In Crete, one can find oneself in unlovely farm towns in various places around the admittedly much bigger island, and the big cities lack the aesthetic allure of Corfu Town’s old Venetian core, but on the whole they are more palatable.
Did I manage to find any hotels at all of note? There could be one or two on the periphery of the old town, but for one reason or another still fell wide of the mark and that’s why recommendations are withheld.
To truly enjoy Corfu, you probably need to either rent a villa or buy one. Don’t let that frank assessment deter you from exploring the island, but just adjust your expectations accordingly.
Ditto for the food — I enjoyed a gyro with the signature Corfiot red sauce, but the chicken underneath was raw! The fries rocked but as Lisa from Temecula might say, cook my meat! And stay-wise too, come on Corfiots: y’all need to do a little better.
