A dream destination in the heart of the Mediterranean attracted crowds every summer until the 1980s. However, it is now completely abandoned.
It is a difficult time to imagine for the rare tourists who approach it today, but under the Mediterranean sun and on the coast of the Aegean Sea, this place was once one of the most popular places in this very touristic country. Its fine sandy beaches and the crystal clear waters of a pine-wooded islet, connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, are mobbed every summer by hordes of vacationers from the capital just a few hours’ drive away.
Hotels, restaurants, nightclubs… Everything is planned to accommodate them as best as possible. We danced until the end of the night in the fashionable nightclubs, we slept in elegant bungalows in the heart of the pine forest and we sunbathed on deck chairs while admiring the postcard scenery.
This Eden on the coast of the Aegean Sea was none other than Pézonissi, a tiny island near Eretria on the west coast of Euboea, north of the Greek capital, Athens. Nicknamed “the island of dreams” in the 1970s, the destination was a must for trendy youth and Athenian high society. After a fanfare debut, her star gradually faded, until she sank into total obscurity in the early 2000s.
How can we explain such a change of fortune? The winding story of Pézonissi is in fact indicative of the excesses of mass tourism in Greece, judges today the Greek website Ethnos, taken from the former political newspaper of the same name. The decline began in the 1980s, when aging infrastructure was not renovated, customer service changed and competition from other destinations increased.
But it was above all a legal and administrative imbroglio that dealt the final blow. The island, owned by the municipality of Eretria, has experienced a succession of status changes, uncertain leases, aborted takeover projects and legal proceedings. Result: nobody really knows who does what there and who owns the buildings. The ruins of old hotels, restaurants and nightclubs fall into the middle of nature that is reclaiming its rights.
The demise of the “Island of Dreams” thus spectacularly illustrates the disastrous consequences of uncontrolled tourism, poorly managed by public authorities, and motivated solely by short-term interests, assesses the Greek news website. A model of predatory development that has disfigured many remarkable natural sites in the Greek archipelago since the 1960s, the former “island of dreams”, has become one of its sad symbols.