Southern Peloponnese

R’s parents decided to join us for a months while we explore Greece’s Peloponnese. We started in the south, near Kalamata.

Arfara

We based ourselves in the small town of Arfara. The town was very cute with everything you need: 3 supermarkets, 1 pharmacy, 1 butcher, 1 bakery, 1 Gyros restaurant, and 2 bars. Our house was positioned in an olive grove just a 2 minute walk into the center of town. The view over the olive trees and onto the mountains was beautiful – especially at sunset. The gardens also included several fig trees, an orange tree, a lemon tree and tortoise named Sugar.

On one of the first days, we went to the local beach to have a swim and discovered a great bar that had cheap drinks and played reggae music. The kids especially loved it and kept begging to go back.

Ano Arfara

Our apartment host told us that there was going to be a festival up in the mountains in the town of Ano Arfara starting around 9pm. Usually, the ‘Ano’ (meaning Old) is located near the ‘new’ town, but not in this case. We found ourselves going for a 1 hour drive through very narrow, windy mountain roads. It seemed that we were heading for nowhere. But, eventually we made it to the town and there were a couple of hundred people there, eating food from a food truck, drinking beers and listening to local music. We found out later that it was a festival for a saint that the church in the town was named after. The priest from our town sat with us and a few others at our table.

If you want to hear some of the music, you can play this video.

Ancient Messene

Also spelled Messine and Messini. We were really impressed with this ancient Greek/Roman city. It was expansive and included a theatre, and stadium, a smaller ampitheatre for governement debates, an Agora, a promenade and several houses. On the way there, we drove through several small towns and olive groves and had to wait for some sheep who were using the road.

After visiting the archeological site, we drove slightly further up and visited the city gate and part of the wall where we had dinner.

Kalamata

We visited the city of Kalamata which is a fairly modern city with a destroyed castle. The city was full of the usual clothing shops and restaurants. One of the cool things about the city was all the murals.

One day we did a circular drive around the south-western penninsula visiting the towns of Koroni and Methoni and then stopping for a swim on a famous beach.

Koroni

This town had a really interesting castle area on the mountain. It was quite a large area and you could tell that at one point it housed several houses inside it’s walls. Today, there are still a few houses there and a large monestary complex. The lower part of the town was on the water and looked like a typical Greek town.

Methoni

In Methoni, the castle is on the waterfront and acted as a gateway to guard the Kalamata gulf (along with the castle in Koroni – known as the “Two Eyes”). The castle looked like it was more impressive on the outside than the inside so we didn’t bother to pay the 5 euro entry ticket. Other than the castle, Methoni had a cute beach area, but the main town was not very impressive.

Voidokilia Beach

At the end of the day, we stopped at the famous Voidokilia beach. This horseshoe shaped beach was a bit interesting to get to (driving through narrow roads through an olive grove) and one of the few sandy beaches. We were lucky that we arrived late in the day (around 6 pm) so there was some shade and less people.

We also visited Mystras and Sparta, but I’ll put those in another post, because we were blown away and took too many photos!