Corfu looks wrong to anyone arriving from the Aegean, and the reason is historical rather than aesthetic. The Ottomans besieged it four times and never took it, so the island spent four centuries under Venice, then briefly under France, then 50 years under Britain. What you get is arcaded streets, tall shuttered buildings in ochre and terracotta, a cricket pitch in the middle of town, and not a single whitewashed cube.
The Old Town
It is a UNESCO site and it earns it. Two Venetian fortresses bracket a dense grid of six-storey buildings and alleyways the locals call kantounia, which are narrow enough that two of them meeting at a corner blocks both.
The Liston, the arcaded terrace facing the Spianada, was built by the French in 1807 and copies the Rue de Rivoli. Behind it the Spianada is the largest square in Greece, and the cricket pitch on it is a genuine leftover of British rule, still in use. Nobody plans this combination. It simply accumulated.
North, west and south are three different islands
The northeast, from Nissaki up to Kassiopi, is the green expensive strip: olive groves running down to small pebble coves, villas on the slope, and Albania two kilometres across the channel. This is Durrell country and it still looks like it.
The west coast has the drama. Paleokastritsa, Porto Timoni and the cliffs at Cape Drastis are the photographs, and the sunsets face the right way. It is also the busiest side in July.
The south splits sharply: Kavos at the tip is a young resort strip with a reputation it has earned, while the rest of the south, around Lake Korission and Halikounas, is dunes, a wetland with flamingos in winter, and almost nobody.
The rain nobody mentions
Corfu is the wettest part of Greece. That is why it is green when the Cyclades are brown, and it is also why a week in May or October can genuinely be washed out. July and August are dry and hot; the shoulder months are lovely and a gamble. Bring one layer more than you think.
Practical
- The island is 65km long. Corfu Town to Kassiopi is 40 minutes, to Kavos closer to an hour, and the mountain roads to the west coast are slow.
- The airport runway ends at a lagoon and the approach passes low over Pontikonisi. Sit on the left.
- Ferries run to Igoumenitsa in 90 minutes and to Italy overnight.
- Easter here is the biggest in Greece outside the islands’ own traditions, with the botides, clay pots thrown from balconies on Holy Saturday morning. Book months ahead or avoid it.
Where we work
Athens and Mykonos. Not Corfu, not the Ionian, and not anywhere else in the country. There is no representative on the island and no arrangement to be made there under our name.
This page exists because the search term that leads here implies otherwise, and it is more useful to say so at the top of a page than after a conversation. If the capital is part of your trip, that is what the Athens page is for.
