Blue sky thinking: six sun-drenched seaside getaways in southern Europe | Travel

Loutro, Crete, Greece

Depending on how you look at it, Loutro is either deeply inhospitable or a rare slice of seaside perfection. Backed by Crete’s hulking White Mountains, this tiny harbour – a curve of whitewash-and-blue, lapped by the Libyan Sea – is only reachable by boat or on foot. Getting here takes effort. Once you’ve settled in to its rhythms, though, leaving is harder still.

Humans have been making that effort for millennia. Loutro sits on the site of Phoenix, an ancient Greek and Roman harbour. Saracen pirates used it as a base for attacking passing ships. The Venetians drove them off, and built a small fortress; the Turks later did the same, and ruins of both still cling to the hills. But now there’s no such turbulence. Loutro feels apart from such things. Apart from all things. Here, life is shrunk to about 400 metres, the distance from the first taverna to the last.

I walked in, along part of the mighty E4 trail, which starts 6,300 miles away, in Spain. Hot and sticky, I took a simple room at Hotel Ilios (from around €55), right by the water’s edge – most of Loutro’s guesthouses are. With the windows wide open, I stretched out and listened: soft chants from the church, the hypnotic schwoosh of the sea. My hosts were the family Androulakakis: the old man sat sentry on a chair in the shade while his wife conjured creamy tzatziki, Sfakian cheese pie and fish stew in the kitchen; their sons served the dishes, plus carafes of quaffable rosé and, inevitably, raki – the potent conclusion to every meal, free and free-flowing.

It took no more than two minutes to walk from my room to a little patch of pebble and sand for a swim. But for spectacular bathing it’s better to walk 45 minutes east to Glyka Nera, AKA Sweetwater Beach, a dazzling bay backed by imperious cliffs. At the near end is a floating cafe, a few parasols – very civilised.

The far end is for naturists. I’d never skinny-dipped before but here I couldn’t resist. Maybe it was the colour of the sea – equal parts azure, cerulean, turquoise, emerald, teal. Maybe it was the raki. Or maybe it was the sense of being seen only by those who’d made the same pilgrimage. Whatever it was, I stripped off and plunged into the cool deliciousness.
Sarah Baxter

Stromboli, Italy