Xerokampos Bay

Xerokampos occupies the far southeastern corner of Crete, a coastal plain facing the Libyan Sea with mountains at its back and very little between it and North Africa. The name means dry plain, and it is not a figure of speech: this is the most arid inhabited stretch of the entire country. For a long time that made it a place people left rather than one they visited, which is precisely why it still looks the way it does.

The Driest Corner of Greece

Administratively Xerokampos belongs to the municipality of Sitia, in the Lasithi regional unit at the eastern end of the island. It lies roughly 47 kilometres south of Sitia, 69 kilometres east of Ierapetra and more than a hundred from Agios Nikolaos, distances that mean little on a map and a great deal on Cretan mountain roads. The 2021 census recorded 83 permanent residents.

The aridity is a matter of geography rather than bad luck. The Sitia and Thrypti ranges rise to the north and west and wring the moisture out of weather systems before they reach the plain, leaving a rain shadow with mean annual rainfall of about 219 millimetres and a mean annual temperature near 21 degrees Celsius, a hot semi-arid climate in Koppen terms and, by the numbers, the driest area in Greece. The landscape follows from that: bare rock, low scrub, thin olive groves and almost no shade.

Ambelos and the Older Record

About a kilometre southeast of the modern settlement lie the ruins of Ambelos, a Hellenistic city founded some time in the 5th century BC and at its most prosperous during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, when it traded with other Cretan towns and across the water with Rhodes and Kalymnos. Excavation began in 1984 at Farmakokefalo under the archaeologist N. P. Papadakis and uncovered houses, streets and stretches of city wall spread over a low hill, along with lead sling bullets, the ammunition of the Cretan slingers whose reputation as mercenaries was one of the island's more reliable exports. The material is held in the Archaeological Museum of Sitia. In the middle of the ancient site stands the small blue-domed chapel of Agios Nikolaos, built in 1895, which now lends its name to one of the beaches below it.

Occupation here is older still. A substantial Minoan settlement has been identified at Katsounakia and remains unexcavated, and an ancient sanctuary has been recorded at Trachelas nearby, so the plain has been in intermittent use for well over three thousand years without ever growing into a town of any consequence.

Beaches, Roads and Arriving by Water

The shoreline breaks into a series of small adjacent coves rather than one continuous strand. Gerontolakkos, also called Agios Nikolaos after the chapel above it, is the main beach; Argilos takes its name from the clay in the surrounding rock, which visitors dig out and use as a mud bath; Vourlia is a smaller bay of coarse golden sand. All of them shelve gently and none of them are organised in any serious way.

By road, Xerokampos is reached from Sitia or Ierapetra through the village of Ziros, or from Zakros to the north, on tarmac that arrived only relatively recently and still winds past deserted medieval villages such as Etia. By sea the approach is far simpler. The bays give clear water and shelter well away from the traffic of the north coast, and many charter guests exploring Greece anchor here for the afternoon before carrying on toward Kato Zakros or making the run north to Sitia.