PARLEZ-VOUS FOLEGANDROS? The 411 on the new French island favorite

The Santorini overflow is coming to an island near you...like this one!

Jul 28, 2024

FOLEGANDROS, GREECE — Every once in a while in my travels over the years I’ve come across a truly remarkable journalist. They are very few. In America today, practically nonexistent — most are just peddling partisan bile, some too brainwashed to realize it. It’s what happens when you don’t follow the Socratic axiom to lead an examined life, or at least to make more than a half-assed effort.

Failure to question authority is the best way for a given society to seal its doom. In Europe, which long ago sold its geopolitical spine out to stupid Uncle Sam, overtourism is threatening to turn cities into uglier versions of Disneyland. Santorini is a case in point. When Giorgos Lialos, one of the best reporters in southern Europe, warns that “Greece’s islands, and the Cyclades in particular, are at a tipping point” and that “everything is up for grabs” well, as we say, Houston we have a problem.

By the way, as overcrowded as a place like Santorini is, it’s still paradise compared to an American hellpit like Dallas, with its sloth-like people (I guess they’re called Texans) and its repulsive-on-every-level airport. And yet … as we have described, the little island with the big views is buckling under the weight of too many visitors.

This morning we took an unpleasant ferry ride (too crowded, no fresh air) from Piraeus to Folegandros, a small Cycladic island famous for nothing in particular. But the air is clean and zero cruise ships. Lots of French pottering about — and yes, they still dress better than us, and they are still not fat like us, and yes Jordan Bardella should be our next vice president. D’accord, enough with that petite reverie.

Ooh la la, une plage à Folegandros. Photo: Anthony Grant

Anyway, they didn’t even film a single scene of Le Grand Bleu here, and yet the Frenchies are here in force. One couple I spoke to fled Paris during the Olympics and said they cut short their visit to Santorini after just one day because of the crowds. “C’est une catastrophe!” one of their friends said in that coolly dismissive Gallic way.

Not everywhere, mind you, but in the main town Fira, and of course the overrated Oia that has some nice vantage points to watch the sun set and lures in the dumbass Instagram brigades accordingly. They had had enough, and sashayed over here.

They said they would be going back to Santorini but only to use the airport. The French have savoir-faire, they invented it! Their growing presence on all the islands around Santorini but pointedly not including it is a bellwether of things to come.

Locals in Folegandros will tell you how the French are snapping up properties all over the island — maybe they fear a looming civil war in France (don’t trust that rat-like Macron for a minute), maybe they like the Aegean breezes, but they a-comin’.

And as Mr. Lialos notes, the government “has expressed nothing but denial in the face of this blight, which is spreading even to the ‘alternative’ islands and those once regarded as too far away to be popular. It refuses to stop rampant construction outside zoned areas; it refuses to take drastic measures to curb the spread of Airbnb and new hotels; it refuses to increase the distance from the shoreline where construction is allowed; it refuses to put limits on cruise ships and huge tourist resorts. It’s allowing a free-for-all. And in so doing, it risks going down in history as the government that surrendered the Cyclades.”

That may be hyperbole.

Then again, it might not be.

Americans bear a special responsibility here, imposing as we tend to do our quiet commercial imperialism onto the rest of the planet. We should start seriously thinking about requisitioning cruise ships above a certain size for scrap use, with all proceeds going to support marine life preservation. And everyone needs to boycott Airbnb.