Stavros

Taverna Thanasis: our destination

We are in Crete for a Wildflower holiday.  However yesterday's first field trip was extremely gruelling and so we decided to opt out of today's one in order to explore our immediate surroundings - we are staying in an apartment on the edge of the village of Stavros on the coast of the Akrotiri Peninsula.

We turned right out of the site and followed a winding road down to the beautiful almost circular bay at the east end of the main bay. This was our initial view.

From the other side, the circular nature was a bit clearer.

The film Zorba the Greek was famously filmed here and, inevitably, Zorba's Taverna is close at hand.

There are two former windmills - we had noticed that it is very windy - and one of these, although lacking its sails, has been attractively restored.

The other one has been clad in stone and had some sort of battlemented construction built on to it. It looks ridiculous.

We turned inland in search of the taverna at far end of the main beach where we had eaten the previous night and walked along the streets a bit. Some houses are smart, but others are ramshackle. Eventually we spotted a way onto the beach. There were some trees at the back of the beach and the overall effect was quite Caribbean.

We walked along the soft sandy beach, noticing the large amount of rock at the waterline. One of these rocks had the imprint of sea creatures. We couldn't say if they were alive or dead.

Plants had colonised the end of the beach, creating something like the sort of flower meadow we had expected to see on our wild flower holiday (instead it seems to be focused on a search for rare orchids - not really our thing).

The splendid red flower is Red Hottentot Fig - apparently an alien invader.

We crossed some rocks to reach the taverna where we had an excellent lunch and enjoyed fantastic views of the bay with the mountains beyond.

Conditions: clear sky, reasonably warm, about 18 degrees. Quite windy, so the sea was quite rough.

Distance: 3.5 miles

Rating: four stars


Sightings

We saw quite a lot of this pretty flower: Sea Rocket.

And I was pleased to begin to see some butterflies - yesterday was too dull. I got a nice shot of this Common Blue.