Platanos

Platanos is a small village in the Kissamos municipality of the Chania regional unit, on the western end of Crete. Set inland at around 240 metres above sea level, roughly 11 kilometres west of the town of Kastelli and some 53 kilometres from Chania, it takes its name from the old plane tree (platanos) still standing in its central square. The 2021 census recorded 1,066 residents, a modest rise from 975 a decade earlier, reflecting a community that has grown steadily rather than boomed.

The Village and Its Tree

The plane tree in the square is the village's fixed point, shading the kafeneia around it and giving the settlement its name. Platanos itself is not an ancient place by Cretan standards: it first appears in the census of 1900, having previously been recorded under the names Pano and Kato Mesogia, and in 1920 it became the seat of its own rural municipality. That administrative status is part of why it is unusually well equipped for a village of a thousand people.

Within a few streets there is a primary school, a pre-school and kindergarten, a bank, a pharmacy, an agronomist's surgery, accountants and an insurance agency, along with olive mills, a rural cooperative, a butcher, bakeries, petrol stations and supermarkets. Add the tavernas and cafes around the square, where a meal still tends to end with coffee and raki, and Platanos works as the service centre for the farms and hamlets spread across this corner of the island rather than as a place that exists for visitors.

Greenhouses, Olives and the Turn to Tourism

For generations the village lived off the land. The area is unusually well watered for western Crete, which is why it is green with trees and flowers where much of the region is dry, and that water supports greenhouses, olive groves and the mills that press their fruit. The valley running down to the coast is filled with olive trees and greenhouses growing mainly tomatoes, and livestock farming makes up much of the rest of the traditional economy.

That balance has shifted over the past few decades. As nearby Falassarna developed into one of Crete's best-known beaches, many villagers moved into tourism, opening rooms, tavernas and small shops, and a number relocated their working lives down to the coast at Falassarna and Agios Konstantinos. Plenty still farm as well as letting rooms, which is why the village keeps an unhurried, local feel through the summer while the beaches five kilometres below fill up. Because it sits so close to that coastline, Platanos makes a quiet inland counterpoint to the beach crowds and is a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Greece, who anchor off the western shore before wandering up into the village for coffee, raki or a simple taverna lunch.

Falassarna Below the Village

The beach that changed Platanos lies about 5 kilometres away: long stretches of pale sand and shallow turquoise water facing due west, which is what has kept it on lists of the world's best beaches, including a CNN poll that placed it among the top hundred. Facing west also makes it one of the standard sunset spots on the island.

What most beachgoers miss is the ancient city at the northern end of the bay. Phalasarna was a Hellenistic port and naval power whose acropolis rises around 90 metres above the old harbour. The harbour basin is still ringed by cut stone quays with the mooring stones in place, and was linked to the open sea by two artificial channels, an enclosed harbour of a kind rare anywhere in the Mediterranean. The city's reputation as a pirate base eventually brought Rome down on it: between 69 and 67 BC the Romans stormed Phalasarna, blocked the harbour with masonry and destroyed much of the town.

Geology finished the job. The earthquake and tsunami that struck on 21 July 365 AD lifted the western end of Crete by several metres, and the harbour was left high and dry. When Captain Spratt of the Royal Navy surveyed the site in 1859, he noted that the former port already stood about a hundred yards from the water, roughly where it remains today. Systematic excavation began in 1966 under Yannis Tzedakis and Vanna Niniou-Kindeli of the Ephorate of Antiquities, uncovering tombs and other material now held in the museums at Kissamos and Chania.

The Wider Corner of Crete

Platanos belongs to a municipality that covers a lot of empty ground. Kissamos recorded 10,632 residents across 341 square kilometres at the 2021 census, and took its present shape in 2011 through the merger of the former communities of Kissamos, Inachori and Mythimna. Its territory runs out to the Gramvousa peninsula and the islets off its tip, in the island's far northwest.

Kastelli Kissamos, the coastal town below the village, is the practical base for the area. It has a port with ferry connections towards Kythira and the Peloponnese, and an archaeological museum housed in the old Venetian governor's palace, whose Roman mosaics come from the ancient city of Cisamus that stood on the same site. The hill town of Polirinia, another of the municipality's ancient settlements, lies a short drive inland. Between them these sites make Platanos a reasonable base for a day or two spent looking inland rather than lying on the sand.