Corfu Beaches and Character: Glyfada and Agios Gordios Sand, Sidari Canal d'Amour, Kavos Party Resort, the 220km Corfu Trail, 4 Million Venetian Olive Trees, and the Durrell Literary Legacy
The Corfu beach and character guide covers the long sandy Glyfada and Agios Gordios west coast beaches, the romantic Sidari Canal d'Amour sandstone channels, the Kavos youth nightlife antithesis, the 220-kilometer Corfu Trail inland traverse, the Venetian 4 million olive tree landscape, and the Gerald and Lawrence Durrell 1930s literary legacy.
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Corfu Beaches: Glyfada and Agios Gordios
Glyfada beach on the west coast of Corfu, the long sandy beach backed by the cliffs of the Corfu plateau with the beach clubs, the watersports, and the fine sand that makes it the finest beach in Corfu for the activity-oriented visitor, and Agios Gordios beach south of Glyfada, the more secluded and more naturally beautiful long beach surrounded by the dramatic limestone cliffs, together constitute the finest beach circuit on the Ionian island that is better known for its cultural heritage than its beach quality.
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Sidari: The Canal d'Amour
Sidari in the northwest, the resort village famous for the Canal d'Amour, the narrow sea channel cut through the sandstone rock by the wave erosion where the local tradition holds that couples who swim through together will marry, is the most romantically exploited natural feature in Corfu and the primary resort excursion destination from the north Corfu hotel zone. The sandstone rock formations of the Sidari coast, eroded into arches and channels by the Ionian wave action, are the most dramatic coastal geology in Corfu.
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Corfu Nightlife: The Kavos Strip
Kavos at the southern tip of Corfu is the most concentrated party resort in Greece after Mykonos, with the strip of bars, the clubs, and the beach parties that attract the 18 to 25 British package holiday market in the most intense concentration of youth nightlife outside the Cyclades. The Kavos experience, the direct antithesis of the refined cultural tourism of the Corfu Old Town 50 kilometers north, represents the duality of Corfu as simultaneously the most culturally significant and the most commercially debauched island in the Ionian Sea.
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Corfu Trail: The 220-Kilometer Walk
The Corfu Trail, the 220-kilometer long-distance footpath traversing the island from Kavos in the south to Cape Drastis in the north through the olive groves, the mountain villages, the coastal cliffs, and the Corfu plateau landscape, is the finest long-distance walking route in the Ionian Islands and the most complete way to experience the agricultural interior of an island that the majority of visitors experience only from the beach and the resort strip.
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Corfu Olive Oil: The 4 Million Trees
Corfu has approximately 4 million olive trees, more per capita than any other Greek island, planted largely during the Venetian occupation when the Republic paid the Corfu families per tree planted in a deliberate policy to create an olive oil industry. The result is the most completely olive-forested landscape in the Ionian Islands, with the ancient gnarled trunks of the Venetian-era trees creating the characteristic silver-green landscape of the Corfu interior that the Durrell family lived in and wrote about.
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The Durrells of Corfu: Gerald and Lawrence
The Corfu of the 1930s, where the Durrell family lived from 1935 to 1939 in the succession of villas in the olive groves and by the sea, is the most internationally celebrated personal encounter with a Greek island in the 20th century English literature, documented in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals and Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell. The Durrell family residences, identifiable in the landscape despite the development, and the Durrell School of Corfu at the Kontokali Bay are the primary Durrell heritage connections accessible to the visitor.