The village street
Shops, houses, a café and a school of an isolated society.
Ggia — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Goosi — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Goosi — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Goosi — CC BY-SA 4.0
**A full day, with a boat for the last stage.** First reach the north-eastern coast: **Elounda**, **Plaka** or **Agios Nikolaos** — about 70 km from Heraklion (an hour and a quarter by car, or a regional bus to Agios Nikolaos then a local one). Then a **boat**: the shortest crossing is from **Plaka** (a few minutes), longer and dearer from Elounda or Agios Nikolaos. ⚠ Check the **boat timetable** and the last return before you cross; sailings are **seasonal** and stop in rough seas.
Yes, and it is worth knowing before going. This is a place where **people were forcibly separated from their families for life** for a disease we now know to be barely contagious and curable, and where their children were taken from them at birth. You walk their streets and among their houses, shops and school — and what affects you is not squalor but the opposite: **the trace of an ordinary life** they built regardless. ⚠ It suits school-age children with explanation, and not young ones. Behave as you would at a memorial rather than at a ruin.
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A small island in the **Elounda** gulf in north-eastern Crete, carrying one of the heaviest stories in the island's modern history. The **Venetians** built an enormous sea fortress on it in 1579 to guard the gulf, and it held out against the Ottomans for decades after Crete itself had fallen. The Ottomans then settled a whole village on it, leaving in the early twentieth century. In **1903** the Greek state turned it into a **leper colony** — every case in Crete, and later in all of Greece, was sent here by force, the patient separated from their family for good. Hundreds of people lived here and built a **complete society**: streets, shops, a café, a church, a school, a municipality and a small theatre; they married and had children — children taken from them at birth if born healthy. The colony closed in **1957** after a cure was found, and it was **the last leper colony in Europe**. ⚠ What you see today is an entire abandoned village inside Venetian walls — reached **by boat only**.
Shops, houses, a café and a school of an isolated society.
Sea fortifications of 1579 ringing the whole island.
The passage patients entered and did not leave by.
Spinalonga, Gulf of Elounda, Crete