Meganisi

Meganisi lies just east-southeast of Lefkada in the Ionian Sea, a small island whose municipality covers 22.4 square kilometres and rises to 309 metres at its highest point. The 2021 census recorded 926 residents, down from 1,246 at the 1991 count, as younger islanders left for Lefkada, Athens or abroad in search of work and schooling. Even the island's own lyceum only takes pupils so far: the later years of secondary education mean crossing to Nydri on Lefkada.

Three Villages and Three Harbours

Island life is divided between three settlements. Katomeri, the administrative seat, sits on high ground with long views over the channel; Spartochori occupies a ridge above the small landing at Spilia; and Vathy lies at the head of a deep, well-sheltered inlet that gives it the best natural harbour on the island. Below Katomeri, the cove of Atherinos provides a third mooring, so a boat has real options depending on which way the wind is blowing.

The link to the outside world is the car ferry from Nydri on Lefkada, roughly four nautical miles away, with the crossing taking around half an hour to either Vathy or Spilia. There is no airport on Meganisi; visitors arriving by air use Preveza and continue by road, since Lefkada is joined to the mainland by a causeway rather than reached by boat.

Farming and fishing shaped the island for centuries. Olives and vines were the main crops — the Zavitsanos olive press at Spartochori still works — while those who left made their living at sea as boatmen and captains. The pattern left Meganisi with a working, lived-in feel rather than a resort one, and with a coastline of coves that has stayed largely clear of large-scale development.

Skorpios, Sparti and the Onassis Years

The municipality also takes in the islets of Sparti and Skorpios, the latter one of the most photographed private islands in the Mediterranean. Aristotle Onassis bought the 83-hectare island in 1963, planted it with imported trees and created a beach using sand brought in from Salamis. He married Jacqueline Kennedy there on 20 October 1968, and he, his son Alexander and his daughter Christina are all buried on the island.

Skorpios passed to Onassis's granddaughter Athina, and in 2013 a group of companies holding a long-term lease on Skorpios and Sparti was acquired by Ekaterina Rybolovleva, daughter of the Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev, for a reported $153 million. The island sits inside a Natura 2000 protected area, which caps development at a small fraction of its surface, so from the water it still reads as a wooded green hump rather than a built-up estate.

The Papanikolis Cave and a Homeric Claim

The best-known natural feature is the Papanikolis Cave on the south-western coast, reachable only by sea. Its mouth is around 60 metres wide and up to 20 metres high above the waterline, and the passage behind it runs roughly 120 metres back to a small beach — wide enough that day boats motor straight inside. The cave takes its name from the Greek submarine Papanikolis, said to have used it as a hiding place during the Second World War; that boat and its sister Katsonis were the first submarines Greece ordered after the First World War, built in France between 1925 and 1927.

The island also has a claim on Homer. Some researchers, notably the German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, identified Meganisi with Krocylea, listed in the ancient sources among the possessions of Odysseus — part of Dörpfeld's wider and much-argued case that Lefkada, not modern Ithaca, was the Homeric Ithaca. The identification has never been settled. With several natural harbours at Vathy, Spilia and Atherinos, and a coastline of quiet coves largely spared from mass tourism, Meganisi is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Greece and want a slower pace between the busier ports of Lefkada.