About Skopelos

Skopelos is one of the three main islands of the Northern Sporades, lying in the Aegean Sea east of the Pelion peninsula and north of Euboea, within the region of Thessaly. The municipality covers roughly 96 square kilometres and is dominated by two summits, Delphi at 681 metres and Palouki at 546 metres, giving the island a hillier, greener profile than many Cycladic neighbours. Its coastline runs for about 67 kilometres, much of it cliff-bound and reachable only from the water. The 2021 census recorded 4,518 residents, concentrated mainly in Skopelos Town, the whitewashed port also known as Chora, with the smaller village of Glossa near the island's northwestern tip and Neo Klima further along the western shore; in summer the population swells several times over as visitors arrive.

History

In antiquity the island was known as Peparethos, and early tradition credited Cretan settlers with introducing viticulture there; the resulting wine became locally famous, praised in Sophocles' play Philoctetes and later ranked among the finest vintages of its time by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder. The island also produced its own chronicler, Diocles of Peparethus, a historian of the early Hellenistic period whose account of Rome's founding later fed into the work of Roman writers such as Fabius Pictor. Peparethos passed under the Kingdom of Macedon and then Rome before entering nearly a thousand years of Byzantine rule, briefly interrupted by the Latin Empire of Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade. Ottoman forces took the island in the early 15th century, and it later passed to the Republic of Venice, which knew it as Scopelo, before reverting to Ottoman control until Greek independence.

Skopelos formally joined the modern Greek state on 3 February 1830, under the London Protocol, and was occupied by Italy and then Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Its scenery gained wider international fame in 2007, when the film Mamma Mia! used the chapel of Agios Ioannis, near Glossa, as a filming location for its wedding scene, drawing a new wave of visitors to an island that had previously stayed off the main tourist routes.

Villages and Architecture

Skopelos Town, the island's port and administrative centre, was declared a Traditional Settlement of Outstanding Beauty by presidential decree in 1978, a status that imposes strict building rules: new construction is limited to two storeys, with sloped tile or stone roofs and wooden doors, windows and balconies in the traditional style. The result is a townscape of whitewashed houses climbing the hillside above the harbour. Glossa, the island's second-largest settlement, sits at an elevation of 200 to 300 metres near the small harbour of Loutraki, while Neo Klima, on the western coast, was purpose-built after the destructive earthquake of 1965 to rehouse residents of the older hillside village of Klima. Religious architecture is unusually dense for an island of this size: Skopelos counts more than 360 churches and chapels, the oldest of which, the Basilica of Agios Athanasios in the Kastro area, dates to the 11th century.

Nature, Economy and Culture

Away from its villages, Skopelos remains one of the greener islands in the Aegean, its slopes covered in Aleppo pine, kermes and holm oak, and old olive groves that once fed a larger agricultural economy; timber cut from these forests once supplied the island's own shipyards, which contributed vessels to the Greek fleet during the War of Independence in the 1820s. The wider Northern Sporades, of which Skopelos forms part, are among the last significant Mediterranean breeding areas for the endangered monk seal. Agriculture today centres on plums, traditionally sun- or oven-dried into prunes, along with almonds, olives and a distinctive local cheese known as katiki; wine production, once the island's calling card in antiquity, declined sharply after the phylloxera blight of the 1940s and has never fully recovered. One unusual social custom has persisted into modern times: property passes down through the female line, with a bride's parents traditionally providing the new couple with a house.

The island has no airport, so access is entirely by sea: hydrofoils and ferries link the port with Volos and Agios Konstantinos on the mainland, and in summer with Kymi on Euboea, while a single coastal road connects Skopelos Town, Glossa and the villages between them. A limited but scenic string of beaches, among them Stafylos, Agnondas, Panormos and Kastani, dots the accessible stretches of coastline, many of them named after the nearest village. Tourism now dominates the local economy, a shift accelerated by the international attention that followed the filming of Mamma Mia!, and further raised by long-term residents such as the German singer Ivan Rebroff, who was made an honorary citizen of the island. The island's dense pine forests, olive groves and largely inaccessible coastline reward a slower pace on the water, which is why so many visitors explore this coast by private gulet charter rather than by road, tracing the coves and small harbours between Skopelos Town, Glossa and the villages along the western shore.