19. HERAKLION - AGIOS NIKOLAOS (Coastal road) (see Map 1 - Map 2)

The coastal national road from Iraklio to Agios Nikolaos is wide, well-designed and ideal for fast riding. As far as Malia, it follows the coast closely and serves the island’s biggest tourist area - this means that there is a lot of traffic and you shouldn’t go too fast on this section of the road. It would also be better to avoid riding on this road at night, because it is full of Irakliot and foreign drivers going to Chersonisos (or Hersonissos) for a night out or coming home from there, usually rather ‘merry’, if not inebriated, after a few drinks.

From Malia to Agios Nikolaos, there is much less traffic on the road so you can accelerate with no trouble. Just after Malia, the road leaves the coast, going in a south-easterly direction, and runs along with the old Iraklio-Agios Nikolaos road in the verdant Selinari ravine where you will enjoy a very spectacular route. At some point, you will see in front of you a huge wall of rock blocking the ravine on its south side. The old road climbs over the top, while the new one goes through the rock via a tunnel. As soon as you come out of the tunnel, you face the cultivated valley of Neopolis through which the road winds like a stream as it descents towards Agios Nikolaos, crossing the old road over bridges and then running directly alongside it. Five or six kilometres before Agios Nikolaos, you will see two European style petrol stations, the best in Crete, where it is worth making a stop for supplies and a bike check before entering the town.
If you don’t want to ride all the distance in one go, there are many places along this route, worth at least a short visit, and some very interesting diversions.

First of all, there is Amnisos, one of the two harbours of Minoan Knossos, built on the coast at the foot of Mesovouni Hill, approximately 8 km east of Iraklio (there are Greek/English signs on both the old road and the new motorway that will lead you to the archaeological site). On the eastern slope of the hill, archaeologist Spyros Marinatos discovered in 1932 a luxurious Minoan villa dating back to 1600 BC, which was called the Villa of Krinon after the well-known fresco that was found here and is on exhibition today at the Iraklio museum. At the foot of the hill on the north side, he found a smaller building which he called the Port Authority, and a little further to the west, an open-air temple with a large round altar, dedicated to Zeus. Due west of the altar are the remains of the jetty of the Minoan harbour, and today, these are sunken beneath the surface of the sea. King Idomeneas set off from here with his ships for the Trojan War, and Odysseus stopped here during his adventurous journey on his way back from Troy (Homer’s Odyssey, T.188-89).

After 26 km is Chersonisos (or Hersonissos), the biggest and most organised summer resort in Crete. If you haven’t been to Chersonisos, you don’t know what chaos is. Mykonos is a girls’ school, Rhodes a hermitage and Corfu a cemetery, by comparison! Just to list the bars and hotels in Chersonisos would take ten pages.

But you don’t need a guide or suggestions to find your way around in Chersonisos - all the buildings here are either bars, discotheques, hotels, restaurants or tourists shops. The choice is endless! There is also a wide, sandy beach at Chersonisos, but most of the people lying on the sand are not sunbathing but have simply fallen there flat out at dawn after the evening’s revelries. All this is of course only in July and August, well, maybe up to the middle of September. After this, Chersonisos is like a deserted town.

It is rather improbable that you should want to visit Chersonisos for its history, but if you are interested in such things, you can see on the east side of the harbour right in front of the seaside bars, the remains of the jetty of Greco-Roman Chersonisos, then called Cherronisos. Only a few coins and scattered foundations of houses have been saved from the even older town (Cherronisos started off as the port of Lyttos). At the end of the small peninsula (chersonisos) (from which the town took its name) you can also see the foundations and the mosaic floor of a large basilica of the 5th century, and also the marble Christian Altar which was the lid of a Roman sarcophagus before it was recycled!

From an archaeological point of view, there are much more interesting things for you to see a few kilometres along the road at Malia. A huge tourist resort the same size as (and perhaps a little bigger than) Chersonisos has developed around the big sandy beach at Malia and is an open shrine to the goddess Enjoyment, with orgies of feasting and ecstatic dancing until morning! On its east side, however, far away from the noise and the crowds, are the ruins of an important Minoan palace whose name is not known and so it is called by convention “The Palace of Malia”.

West of Malia as far as the cape of Agios Antonios and from there to Agios Nikolaos, the coast is rocky and often precipitous and the hinterland behind is one of the few ‘islets’ where the real character of the Cretan soil survives. Just like the Vamos peninsula in the prefecture of Hania, this big triangular piece of land north of the road from Malia to Agios Nikolaos has avoided tourist development because it is lucky enough not to have beaches and archaeological sites and to be situated in a corner outside the tourist routes. There is of course the jet set resort of Elounda on the east coast, but this is an isolated complex that does not affect the rest of the region.

There are also the ruins of an important Minoan city, Driros, but this is near to Neopolis and most visitors don’t go any further inland. Whichever road you take, you will go through picturesque villages, most of which are unfortunately semi-abandoned, and see impressive monasteries like the restored Moni Aretiou north of the village of Karidi, the ruined Moni Xera Xyla, whose cells have been taken over by a shepherd to use as a sheepfold (!), and the Monastery of Agios Antonios on the Cape of Drepani. You will find few rooms to let in the poor villages, but you can stay at the village coffee-house for a coffee or a very tasty plate of fried potatoes, and it is very likely that the taverna owner will find a room to put you up in for one night.

Elounda is the most ‘jet set’ holiday centre in Crete but without there being any special reason for this. The place is very dry, the coast is rocky, there is no airport or port nearby, neither is there any traditional or historic village that would act as a magnet. Just a few poor villagers lived here and struggled all year round with their olive trees, and they supplemented their income by extracting from the neighbouring hill a type of fine-grained emery, the so-called whetstone from which they made knife sharpeners.

These poor people saw their barren fields acquire enormous value from the one day to the next when the first big hotel complexes started to be built. Today, some ten luxury and ‘A’ category hotels are gathered here, where the cheapest double room costs €300 a night, and to stay in the most expensive, you will have to sell your motorcycle in order to walk over the threshold! It is completely improbable that you will want to stay here, but in the rare event you are on honeymoon or you’ve just won the lottery, we will mention some of them. Astir Palace Elounda, Elounda Mare, Elounda Ilion, Elounda Beach, Elounda Village, Elounda Marmin. Elounda may not have even ten metres of beach worth speaking of, but it does have dozens of swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses where you may meet select members of the financial and political aristocracy or even the Prime Minister in person! If you are an ordinary mortal, there are also some cheap rooms in Elounda, but it is not necessary to tell you how marginalised you will feel staying in these!

Directly opposite Elounda is the deserted island of Spinaloga, which many years ago was not an island but a peninsula that was joined by a narrow sandy isthmus to the opposite shore. The Greco-Roman city of Olous was built on this isthmus, but land subsidence sent it beneath the sea. Archaeological excavations have never taken place here and the only things you can see from ancient Olous (on a day when there are no waves) are some foundations of houses in the shallow water.

The harbour at Spinaloga was the safest harbour in Crete not only because it was not hit by bad weather, but also because its only (at that time) northern entrance was protected by an impregnable fortress built by the Venetians in 1570. But at the beginning of this century, French seamen dug the canal which you can see today, separating Spinaloga from the mainland without there being any important reason for so doing, except perhaps their vanity in creating an island! Today there is a small bridge joining Elounda to Spinaloga. The only road on the island is a rough dirt road (D4) which goes through the bushes and ends up at a small pebbled beach on the east side, a rather inconvenient but quiet spot for rough camping. In order to see the fortress of Spinaloga (which is not actually on Spinaloga but on the small rocky islet of Kalydona, north of Spinaloga) you have to take a boat from Elounda or Agios Nikolaos.

Source of the information on this page : “Unexplored Crete”, Road Editions. For more guidebooks and maps of Greece, click here.