A Greek Odyssey: Year-Round Living on Rhodes and Corfu

In Rhodes’ Evdokia Hotel, it’s not hard to imagine myself a pampered noble. Once a crusading knight’s 700-year-old townhouse, my room features stone walls, high ceilings, and a deep-set fireplace.

Savvas, the hotel’s owner, dispels my notions. “You’re sleeping in the kitchen.”

Turns out, I’m in the serving quarters… and my fireplace was used for cooking.

I’m learning a lot of new things on this trip, foremost among them that Greek islanders are a hardy bunch. They need to be—the weather in summer frequently peaks in the 100s F, but perhaps more surprising is that, in winter, it gets right down into the 30s F.

The Greek island of your imagination—blue-domed villages rising from cliff-lined coves, whitewashed chapels shimmering in heat-haze, al fresco meals on the harborside—is different in the brisk air of off-season.

The pace is languid, the natural beauty enhanced, and the architecture and ambi-ence even more impressive without the blur of tour-bus crowds.

Choose the right spot, update your expectations, and Greek island living transforms from a thin vacation fantasy to a four-season, high-definition picture that follows its own beguiling rhythm.

I focused my trip on two main destinations: Rhodes and Corfu. On the practical side, both islands have international airports and cities large enough to provide necessary amenities whatever the month. On the emotional side, they’re both small enough—and pretty enough—to really feel like Greek islands.

RHODES

Rhodes is compact, culturally rich, and throbs with life in summer. It settles to a quiet comfort in off-season that could be just the thing for getting on with personal projects—painting, gardening, writing that long overdue novel, or simply living well with no deadlines.

The Order of the Knights of St. John (in one of whose kitchens I’m billeted) arrived on Rhodes in 1309. It was they who built the 40-foot-thick stone ramparts that enclose the old town—constructed to deter invaders from penetrating the warren of Byzantine-era townhouses, Italianate plazas, medieval churches, and serpentine Jewish quarter that made up the city of Rhodes in the 14th century. That’s recent history on an island that’s been changing hands since 1100 BC.

Before the tourist season starts, the old town has the tumbleweed stillness of an abandoned movie set. Store windows are shuttered, feral cats loll in sunlit doorways, and the clink of slapping halyards from the nearby anchorage is the dominant rhythm.

The main streets are paved by dark flagstones, polished by centuries of footfall. The blonde-stone alleyways, which make a labyrinth of the residential areas, are narrow enough that you can touch both sides as you walk. Cut stone archways span the gap, supporting single-room annexes or footbridges from one building to its neighbor. On these smaller streets, the paving is a mosaic of sea-rounded cobbles, fitted by hand.

When you stroll the wooden boardwalk on the east side of town, mesmerized by the multiple blues of the calm Aegean Sea, it’s hard to imagine the throng of Northern European vacationers that will soon transform the bay into a melée of cruise boats, inter-island ferries, jet-ski joyriders, banana boaters, parasailers, and splaylegged stand-up paddlers.

Rhodes Town: The Modern Part

For all the abandoned quietude of the offseason old town, daily life continues in the modern section of Rhodes town (you’ll also hear to it referred to as Rhodes city. These names are interchangable and neither is an official designation). On the north side of the old town walls, public gardens mark the transition into the familiar traffic and noise of a small city—50,000 inhabitants, or thereabouts.

It’s an urban area of mid-rise apartment blocks with retail units at ground level. The brands on display are mid- to upmarket—Zara, Benetton, etc.—showing evidence of strong purchasing power in the city’s tourist clientele. Anglophiles will be pleased to note a branch of Marks and Spencer on the main drag. There’s a McDonald’s tucked in among the Scandinavian bars and English tattoo parlors, too.

Given that it’s built on a peninsula, Rhodes town is surrounded by sea. To the west, a fine-pebbled beach stretches to the resort towns along the airport road, with stretches of dramatic walking paths carved into the cliffs just outside of town.

The coast to the east of town is more tranquil—with the ancient harbor nestling below the aquarium, and a wooden boardwalk lined with pleasure cruisers and charter yachts offering a pleasant stroll to the more modern ferry port.

Farther out from the center, things get more practical. Supermarkets, car dealerships, a branch of JYSK (a sort of miniature IKEA), and a produce market flank Highway 95, the main road leading south out of town. A municipal hospital lies about a mile west of the business district toward the city’s ancient Greek acropolis.

The Rhodes Acropolis is well worth a visit. The complex, built in the 5th century BC, costs nothing to wander around, features a fine amphitheater and temple ruins, and hasn’t been commercialized in any way. It also has fine views of the Rhodian and Turkish coasts.

I meet Francisco Huerta over coffee and bitter orange drizzle cake at the Fournariko bakery in old-town Rhodes. Francisco’s a California transplant who moved to the island back in 2019. He’s currently paying €600 ($657) a month for a two-bathroom, two-bedroom apartment in the new part of the city. “Utilities aren’t included in that,” he points out, “and it gets cold here in winter, so heating can add €150 ($164) a month to your costs.”

Compared to California, though, he gets to live 300 yards from the sea for a third of what it would cost him in Santa Barbara, in a place where the family- and friends-focused way of life suits him better than the U.S. did. “I can breathe here, and it feels amazing,” he tells me, and it’s clear that he’s talking about something deeper than just the air quality.

Francisco steers me in the direction of Engel & Volkers real estate, in his experience, it’s the most useful agency in the city. At time of writing, they’re advertising a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, with sea views, for €140,000 ($153,300).

Cost of living on the island is a little higher than I expected. Here at IL, we suggest a budget of around $1,830 per month to live in Greece. That’s probably sufficient for a single expat living on the mainland, but the economies of Greek islands—transportation costs, scarcity of accommodation, captive market—push the total higher on Rhodes. A couple would need $3,000 a month to live comfortably here. Imported goods are particularly pricey (Francisco estimates that they’re about 10% more here than in the U.S.), but property prices like those go a long way to even out the balance.

On the Road to Lindos

I rent a nippy 125cc scooter from Scooter Center Rhodes to explore the rest of the island. The coast road, running southeast, brings me through the twin resorts of Ammoudes and Faliraki, both of which share a soft-sand bay.

Ammoudes is little more than a cluster of apartment buildings and a closed-for the-winter fairground.

Faliraki is a beach town with a reputation for partying. U.K. tabloid editors frequently bridge the slow news days of summer with shock stories about the lascivious excesses of vacationers here. Think Cancún, only with hordes of sunburned British, German, and Dutch replacing spring-break kids from Ohio and New Jersey. If that’s your thing, go for it! But if you’re seeking a more in-depth Rhodes experience, it’s probably best avoided in high season.

Alas, when I pull up in Faliraki, all evidence of amoral debauchery is absent. The waterslides are dry and the palapa bar parasols are ragged and bald from a winter’s worth of north winds. Where the main strip would normally be, there’s a collage of menu boards, beach inflatables, and cocktail bar awnings… all is quiet and dusted with a film of fine limestone rime. Nowhere on my travels have I come across such an extreme contrast between high and low season.

From October to April, the island economy slips back a thousand years. Today, there’s nowhere in Faliraki to buy a cold drink, but at a roadside stall at a junction just out of town, a woman in widow’s black shawl sells me sweet oranges from a table heaped with citrus.

The sea around Rhodes makes up for any austerity. At every turn, it’s a different hue. On the choppy northwest coast, the crash of wind-swell aerates the water, turning it a milky cerulean that seems to glow in the backlight of the setting sun. Here on the sheltered eastern shore, it’s a clearer greenish blue, darkened by patches of lapis and a hundred tones between.

Lindos: A Textbook Island Village

For all the magnificence of Rhodes town, it has nothing to compare with the comforting prettiness of Lindos. About 30 miles south of Rhodes town, the village has its roots in the Dorian era (some 3,000 years ago) and there are scatterings of Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman architecture throughout.

I’ve come to see if the town has a large enough year-round population to be a comfortable relocation destination. The answer is no, but the trip is worthwhile just to see the place.

Sugar-cube homes clamber upwards from a turquoise bay toward a pinnacle capped with the 20-columned classical Greek stoa of the Temple of Athena. And there are medieval fortifications, Byzantine chapels, and Roman ruins, too. In Lindos you can get your fill of worthy cultural immersion in one swoop, then spend the afternoon recovering on the beach with a glass of cold ouzo.

Or you could if it were high season. In my case, having gotten there on a Tuesday in March, the temple complex was closed.

Nevertheless, even without visiting its acropolis, Lindos is impressive. Climbing the whitewashed alleys of the village, views of the Aegean flash up every few moments, as the narrow pathway turns abruptly between ornate sea-captain homes or becomes a stairway around a room-sized Byzantine church.

The Wine Country of Western Rhodes

Rhodes is no more than 25 miles wide, but any expectation of a quick jaunt across the island is soon dashed. The roads heading inland are well-paved, but sinuous and narrow.

The west of the island is dominated by Mount Attavyros, a looming, 4,000-foot monolith of bare limestone bursting out of the vineyards of Rhodes’s wine country.

The shift in vegetation from olive and cypress trees to the hardier pines of the uplands is a clue that the region is protected from the extreme heat of summer. On every scrap of flat or near-flat land, rows of grapevines sprout from the dusty soil. In March, they’re gnarled black sticks, but by May they’ll be in full leaf.

The roadside on the approaches to the three-street town of Embonas is punctuated by billboards offering free wine tastings, underground wine cellars to visit, and all manner of handmade olive wood crafts. In a wine world increasingly dominated by the same five or six grape varieties, well-established rows of local varietals Amorgiano (red) and Athiri (white) make for wines that are a novelty well worth exploring.

Year-Round Living on Rhodes?

A cozy expat community calls Rhodes home. The Living on Rhodes Together Facebook group pulls English-speaking expats and is a good place to find out what’s going on.

Packed with history and points of cultural interest, there’s a lot to explore on the island. If natural Mediterranean beauty is enough to sustain you, if you’re self-contained, perhaps an artistic type, or someone for whom the quiet months from November to May are time to prepare a vegetable garden for spring, it could be ideal.

While life on the island offers nothing comparable to the clubby expat experience of, say, Costa Rica or Panama, if you wish to immerse yourself in the seasonal rhythm of a Greek island, Rhodes is a viable destination. But there’s no glossing over the fact that it’s exceptionally quiet in the off season.

CORFU

Corfu island sits just west of the Greek mainland, south of Albania and about 50 miles east of Italy’s heel. Against a backdrop of a sapphire sky, Corfu Town is like a soft-lit theme park of colonial Europe. Parisian arcades, Venetian fortifications, an English bandstand poised in a village green; in its monumental boulevards and formal parks, the city is a frontispiece for the show-off architecture of 19th-century colonial powers.

But venture deeper in, to where the streets narrow and the gradient steepens. This is where the paint begins to flake and the view overhead is strung with drying laundry, houseplants on windowsills, and tabby cats stalking the suntraps… you could easily be in a Tuscan hill town.

The city’s zones blend easily, but there’s a definite change in atmosphere from one to another. The ornamental arches and carriage lamps of the Liston arcade are the high end, with tables set out on the polished marble plaza. Diners wear charcoal cashmere and keep their sunglasses on long after night falls.

North from Corfu Town

Once again, I rent a scooter to explore. After the aridity of Rhodes, Corfu feels as if a child has been playing with the sliders on a photo editing program. The hills are steeper, the vegetation greener, the sea is even more shades of blue.

Fresh water, which seemed in scant supply on Rhodes, is everywhere on Corfu. It trickles in streams alongside the road where it has seeped from flower-strewn hillsides thick with groves of olive, fig, cypress, and citrus. Tiny Byzantine chapels teeter on clifftops, and whitewashed hillvillages appear at random as the road switchbacks its way along a coastline that plunges to tiny harbors and pebbled beaches.

Almost immediately north of Corfu Town, the coastline folds inwards to the natural harbor of Gouvia. Best known for its extensive marina, the village was once the home of the very literary Durrell family (The Durrells in Corfu is a great binge watch). The beach is still pleasant, but the approaches are now swamped by ribbon development and Corfu’s main municipal hospital.

On the island’s northern tip, I have the otherworldly limestone formations of Sidari’s Canal d’Amour all to myself—fawn-colored layers of rock plunging into the turquoise Ionian Sea without an inflatable crocodile or a beach lounger in sight.

South to Benitses

South of Corfu town, the coast is peppered with resorts. There’s not much to distinguish them—these are clusters of summer accommodation built to cater to busloads of sun-seekers on two-week package vacations. Beer joints with names like Rolling Stone Café or Big Max Diner flank the main streets, while sandy beaches fringe the shoreline.

Just like on Rhodes, the resorts and beach towns are empty when I visit them. An occasional echo of hammers and impact drivers announces that the season will soon start.

One beach town proves the exception—Benitses. Eight miles from Corfu town, with half-hourly buses to get you there, the town harbor and marina are packed with pleasure boats and lined with seafood restaurants. There’s a tiny medical center with English-speaking staff, a few bars, a beachside promenade, and an overall appearance that has a more genuine village feel than sone of the modern resorts farther south. A three-bedroom detached home with landscaped garden and sea view is on the market here for €290,000 ($317,600).

Benitses is popular with expats—I get talking to Tricia Emptage and Clare Alexander, friends who moved from opposite ends of England decades ago, to eventually settle in the village. Tricia, a retired anthropologist, runs the weekly English-language trivia night (currently on Wednesdays at Lotza, but check The Corfu Grapevine Facebook group for venue changes).

I swing inland and take the high road back to Corfu Town. Just a couple of miles from the sea, the villages are something from an earlier century. Stacks of firewood guarded by territorial roosters form pyramids amid citrus groves, while spring water streams babble along stone channels and church bells ring out a clear-toned counterpoint.

Expat Life on Corfu

Back in Corfu Town, I meet up with U.S. expat Mike Millard and his wife, Miwa. They live in Lafki—a village of some 60 people, 10 minutes up a mountainside from the town of Achavari on the north coast of the island.

Mike first visited Greece in 1969, when he was in the Navy. Bit it was 2022 before he finally made the move, after a career involving real estate and journalism that took him from Oregon, across the Pacific, to Asia. He met Miwa when he was working for The Japan Times, and together they’re fixing up a part-stone, three-bedroom house with exposed beams, a stone patio, and sea views. The home cost €77,000 ($84,325), and they’re expecting the renovation to come in at more than €100,000 ($109,500). Included in that is a vineyard, 1,400 square feet of land, and some 15th-century ruins. It’s a project worth doing well.

“Real estate is a currency in the U.S.,” Mike observes. “Here, it’s a generational thing. Something to pass on to your children. That can mean things move a little more slowly, and you really need to get a good attorney to do the paperwork. You also need a good real estate agent. We got lucky with Andy Marshall at Roula Rouva. He’s a fixer. We needed an automatic transmission car—they’re not common in Europe—he found one for us.”

One reason Mike and Miwa moved to Greece was to improve their health. The lifestyle fits them better than the Pacific Northwest did, and the variety of fresh local food and produce helps.

“That’s something that’s cheaper here,” Mike says. “Domestic things, wine, fruit, vegetables… real estate. Imports are expensive—the food we buy for our cats costs three times as much here—but then the vet costs €20 to €50 ($21 to $54) a visit. In the U.S. it’s $100, minimum. Same goes for our own care. It’s €20 to €40 ($21 to $44) to go see a doctor out-of-pocket. And the doctors are good. A lot of them train in Germany or the U.K., then move here because they love the place too.”

Due to a combination of factors—it’s closer to the mainland and has more year-round residents to keep the economy competitive—Corfu is a shade more affordable than Rhodes. Around $2,800 a month would fund a comfortable life for an expat couple (depending on how heavy-handed they were with home heating).

Winter is a little long, Mike admits, but it’s not as cold and damp as Seattle, and summers are warm. He and Miwa hit the beach four or five times a week in season, snorkeling, swimming, sunbathing. “You can spend a lot here, but there’s really no need. You can pick up a rental in Corfu town for €600 ($657) a month. If you own a place, it’s… well, the property tax on our place is $109 a year. In the U.S., we were paying $3,000.”

We chat for a while, sipping excellent local red wine in the ArtHaus café, close enough to the Spiridon church that we can watch full-bearded Orthodox priests pass by in black cassocks and stovepipe hats.

Pink blossom is just breaking through buds on the cherry trees all over Corfu town. “Spring here is glorious,” Mike confirms. “Wildflowers, crystal-clear water, it’s like a rebirth. The island is beautiful.”

Year-Round Living on Corfu?

If you can handle the winter calm, Corfu has a thousand nooks to make a home in.

And if you can’t handle the calm, an alternative would be to spend a couple months on the island (just like Tom Hanks does in his home on Antiparos island). I can think of no better place to pass a warm April to June stretch.

Podcast: Four-Season Living on a Greek Island

Podcast host, Jim Santos, learns all about off-season living on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu, as he talks to International Living Lifestyle Editor Seán Keenan in a recent episode of Bigger, Better World.