I am not in the habit of sharing photos of young children on social media – honestly, officer – but I could not resist using this one which I found on a Facebook group. It was taken high above the little village of Arillas in Corfu, where we have happily holidayed on numerous occasions since 2003, roughly next to the relatively recently built Akrotiri Café which, you should know is a must visit location when you visit Corfu. It brings back lovely memories, not just of Arillas, but also of Corfu the island which I first visited in the year that photo was taken, 1985.
The Corfu we visited back then was a very different place than it is today. Two of us stayed in a suburb of Corfu Town called Garitsa, a short walk to the bay of the same name and a much longer one to the Venetian inspired centre of the town. My friend and I stayed in a small village room within walking distance of the airport and the first thing we noticed, apart from the near 24 hour blast of aircraft engines, was the smell. In 1985, the waters around Corfu Town were basically an open sewer.
It was August and the island was dusty, dry and hot. We travelled around Corfu using rickety buses which ran to their own timetable and not the official one, discovering the wide and sandy resorts of the north west, the rocky villages drilled into the hills of the north east and the varying areas south of the town.
In 1985, the party capital was Benitses, a former fishing village on the west coast going south. It was utterly charmless, stuffed with English style pubs and cafés and sunburnt British bodies in different states of carnage. The locals politely carried on with their lives amid the mess that had become of their village, wishing that one day they could reclaim the area as their own. Slowly but surely the nightlife and pondlife decamped further south to the hell hole that remains Kavos, party time for the hard of thinking and the undiscerning.
As well as the partying with the 18-30 IQ brigade in Kavos, the island welcomed numerous other types of visitors, including those who liked their holidays to be the same as they would be at home, but with better weather. To that end, the north west village of Sidari morphed into the home of the Sunday Roast, Bingo, Karaoke, John Smiths and full English resort of choice for those people who liked the taste of home, or something vaguely like it. Whether by accident or design, Sidari, famous for the legendary Canal d’Amour, just happened to be situated at the opposite end of the island to Kavos leaving, as one person said, possibly in an act of pure snobbery, the rest of this beautiful island for the rest of us to enjoy. This is not a view to which I subscribe, I hasten to add, although having stayed there back in the 1990s in a complex which later featured in one of those ‘Holidays from hell” type TV shows where the owner’s son was literally fighting with his guests, nothing would persuade me to go back.
In 1985, I felt that Corfu was at a fork in the road and the islanders had a choice to make. The island was rampant with development, and it must be said, overdevelopment, and things were simple: keep on building and destroy much of the reason people went to the island in the first place or develop so that the beauty of the island remained. By and large, with one or two exceptions, has managed to embrace mass tourism while at the same time retaining much of the history and natural beauty.
I am at a time of my life when I need to explore new places. Having visited Corfu an absurd 25 times in 38 years, I am well aware that there are many other places, and not just islands, I need to see before I die. But having said that, I am sorely tempted to pay a fleeting visit in 2024 and a longer one in 2025 to celebrate 40 – 40!!! – years of visiting Corfu. Because despite the foolish efforts of developers in the 1980s, it remains a beautiful and enchanting island. No longer cheap and cheerful, but then where is these days?
