Rugged Greek island offers beach, simple pleasures

Imagine a place isolated enough that dissidents of the state are sent into exile there.

Now, make that place so intoxicating that some exiles choose to settle there.

That’s Folegandros, a rugged Greek island in the Aegean Sea.

It is smaller, harder to reach and virtually unknown compared to many other Greek islands — think Crete, Mykonos and Santorini — that draw tourists from around the world. It is harder to pronounce, too (foe-LAY-gan-dross), and doesn’t boast any major ruins.

It has no airport or deep-water port, and is reachable only by the passenger ferries and watercraft that link the Greek islands to each other and mainland Greece.

Cruise ships don’t call. Most island-going tourists don’t, either. That means Folegandros is left to those who spot it on a map.

My wife and I were two of those lucky few, taking five days to soak up the sun’s steady rays, gobble the local specialties of sweet cheese and fresh-caught sea bream and ply the miles of goat paths that lead across hills of sage and chamomile.

Its steep flanks shelter windless coves with gentle pebble-and-rock beaches. And its adolescent tourism industry offers sumptuous meals, comfortable guesthouses and on-time buses.

Its past is crisply visible: The hillsides are spider-webbed with seemingly endless stone walls that frame the fields of the island’s farming forebears. Donkeys are still widely used by the year-round locals as beasts of burden.

Folegandros is about 8 miles long, and traversing its length is a short car trip on the narrow, two-lane road that tiptoes across the island’s spine and connects the island’s three main villages.

Just over 100 miles from Athens, it is one of the southernmost of the Cyclades Islands, between Santorini and Milos. We arrived after a four-hour ferry from the mainland port of Piraeus, near Athens. As all ferries do, ours came into the harbor at the village of Karavostasis, a spit of low-slung white buildings and beach curving around a modest inlet.

With the silvery green sage and dusty red hills, the azure Aegean gives Folegandros a color wheel like few other places.

The road from Karavostasis climbs to Chora, a quickly developing community that is home to the most restaurants and lodging establishments on the island.

Chora is perched dramatically on a northern cliff. From some vantage points, the town — said to have begun as a Venetian fort in the 1200s — seems to hang over it.

As in Karavostasis, the buildings are squat and whitewashed. The center of town is a maze of open-air squares — called plateias — with seating at a couple dozen cafes and restaurants beneath tamarinds and other shade trees.

At night, it pulses with the sounds of disco and whatever else emanates from the clubs, bars and drinking holes. Guesthouse quarters often cluster around a small swimming pool.

One of those is Ampelos Resort, a 10-minute walk from the town’s edge. The good things we’d heard about it from friends of my wife’s relatives in Greece were borne out.

Our first day, we caught the bus to Angali Beach — a trip that will steel your nerves for the rest your stay. (It is also possible to rent a motorbike or car on the island, which we did on our last day).

The roads can be steep and narrow — uncomfortably so at times. Angali Beach is wedged between hills and cliffs, flanked by a handful of eateries and guesthouses.

Like a handful of other beaches on Folegandros, Angali fields the bulk of the island’s beachgoers because it is reached by a paved road.

It is far more rewarding to take a boat or hiking path to Katergo and Livadaki beaches, where no road goes.

We hiked back from Angali, picking our way along a rocky path, past a discretely tucked-away beach with nude frolickers and up a vast hillside high above the coastline.