🇬🇷 Greece · Ionian Islands
Zakynthos is the island of the photo everyone recognises: a white sand cove wedged between vertical cliffs, with an old rusting ship stranded on the sand and a sea of impossible turquoise. That is Navagio (Shipwreck) beach, perhaps the most photographed in Greece. But Zante, as the Venetians called it when they named it 'the flower of the East', is much more: blue caves where the sea glows like neon, sea turtles that have nested on its beaches for millions of years, mountain villages, good wine and a town rebuilt after the earthquake that flattened it in 1953.
The island lives with a tension worth understanding before you go. On one hand, it is a destination of sun, beach and partying, with the bustle of Laganas in summer. On the other, it holds the first National Marine Park in the Mediterranean created to protect the caretta caretta turtle, with serious rules to respect: beaches closed at night, a ban on lights and noise in the nesting areas, limits on umbrellas. And Navagio itself, its symbol, is today closed to the public because of rockfall risk: you can see it from the viewpoint or from the sea, but you can no longer set foot on the sand.
This guide covers Zakynthos with a practical and honest eye: what you can and cannot do at Navagio and in the Marine Park, how to watch turtles responsibly, how to reach the Blue Caves and the caves of Keri, where the best beaches are and how to get around an island with no metro or train. Zante rewards both those after the turquoise postcard and those who want to understand why this 'flower of the Ionian' is also a natural sanctuary.
Inhabited since prehistory and mentioned by Homer, Zakynthos takes its name, according to myth, from a son of King Dardanus of Troy. It was Greek, Roman and Byzantine, but its mark was left by three centuries of Venetian rule (1484–1797), who called it 'Fioro di Levante' and turned it into a refined centre of culture, music and painting, the 'Florence of Greece'. Here in 1798 was born Dionysios Solomos, father of modern Greek poetry and author of the Hymn to Liberty, today the national anthem. After Napoleonic France, the Septinsular Republic and the British protectorate (1815–1864), the island joined Greece in 1864. On 12 August 1953 a devastating earthquake destroyed more than 90% of its buildings: that is why almost no old architecture remains and the town is a reconstruction. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The western islands that were never Ottoman: four centuries of Venetian rule, the short-lived Septinsular Republic, the British protectorate and union with Greece in 1864, marked by a singular Italian-Greek culture and by the 1953 earthquake that flattened Kefalonia and Zakynthos.
Read the history of Ionian Islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Zakynthos is an ancient island that already appeared in the verses of Homer. According to myth, it took its name from Zakynthos, a son of King Dardanus of Troy, who is said to have come from Phrygia and founded the first settlement on the hill where the acropolis would later stand, crowned by the citadel the Venetians would turn into a castle. The Iliad and the Odyssey mention it among the domains of the Mycenaean world, in the orbit of neighbouring Ithaca, home of Odysseus.
In antiquity, Zakynthos was an independent polis with a certain weight: it minted its own coinage, had colonies and took part, like the rest of the Greek world, in the wars and alliances of the classical period, swinging between the influence of Athens and that of Sparta. Its position in the Ionian, on the route between Greece and Italy, made it coveted. It then fell into Macedon's orbit and, in the 2nd century BC, passed into the hands of Rome, which folded it into its Adriatic possessions.
With the division of the Roman Empire, the island remained within the Byzantine world, of which it was a part for centuries, exposed like the whole Ionian coast to raids by pirates, Vandals and Saracens. It was a dark period with a thin population, until the arrival of a new maritime power would completely change its history and its appearance: the Republic of Venice.
Here lies the key that sets Zakynthos and all the Ionians apart from the rest of Greece. While almost the whole Greek world fell under the Ottoman Empire after 1453 and spent four centuries under Turkish rule, the seven Ionian islands took another course under Venice. Zakynthos passed into the hands of the Serenissima in 1484 and stayed Venetian until 1797, more than three centuries. It never knew the Ottoman yoke, and that difference explains almost everything.
The Venetians were so taken with its fertility and its beauty that they named it 'Fioro di Levante', the flower of the East. Under their rule the island flourished economically thanks to the production of currants (a highly valued product in the Europe of the time), oil and wine, and it developed a refined cultural life that earned it the nickname of the 'Florence of Greece'. The local nobility, organised in the Venetian manner with its Golden Book, sponsored a notable school of painting — the Ionian School, which fused the Byzantine tradition of icons with the innovations of the Italian Renaissance — and a musical tradition of its own, the kantades, part-song serenades still heard in the island's tavernas.
From that Venetian period Zakynthos inherited its architecture of bell towers, arcades and palaces (most of them, sadly, now gone), its dialect peppered with Italianisms, its cuisine and an open, European, cosmopolitan identity. While the rest of Greece lived under the Ottoman Empire, Zante was a city of theatres, academies and libraries, a bridge between the Greek and the Western worlds.
The end of Venice in 1797 swept Zakynthos, like the rest of the Ionians, along the current of European history: first Napoleon's revolutionary France, then the short-lived Septinsular Republic (1800), the first semi-independent Greek state of the modern era under Russo-Ottoman protection, another spell of France and, after the Congress of Vienna of 1815, the British protectorate under the name United States of the Ionian Islands.
In that cultured and turbulent setting the island's most illustrious son was born. Dionysios Solomos, born in Zakynthos in 1798, is considered the father of modern Greek poetry and the founder of the Ionian literary school. Educated in Italy, he chose to write in demotic Greek, the language of the people, rather than the archaising Greek of scholars, and with that he laid the foundations of the modern literary language. In 1823, in the middle of the Greek War of Independence, he wrote in Zakynthos the 'Hymn to Liberty' (Ymnos eis tin Eleftherian), a long poem whose first two stanzas, set to music, became the national anthem of Greece (and also of Cyprus). His statue presides over the main square of the town, and his remains rest in the museum that bears his name.
The island, like the rest of the Ionians, was seething with Greek national feeling. Many Zakynthians supported and financed the revolution of 1821 from the other side of the water. Finally, in 1864, Britain ceded the Ionian Islands to the young kingdom of Greece as a gesture towards the new King George I. On 21 May 1864, Zakynthos finally joined the Greek motherland, closing centuries of foreign rule.
To understand what Zakynthos is like today you have to know the day that changed its face forever. On 12 August 1953 a violent earthquake shook the southern Ionian Islands. The main quake, of magnitude around 7.2–7.3, was the largest of a series that struck Zakynthos, Kefalonia and Ithaca over several days, and it was accompanied by devastating fires.
In Zakynthos the destruction was almost total: more than 90% of the island's buildings were destroyed by the tremor and by the fire that spread afterwards. The beautiful Venetian town of Zante — its churches, its bell towers, its palaces, its theatres and libraries, centuries of heritage — disappeared in a matter of hours. It was one of the worst disasters in 20th-century Greece. Many islanders lost everything and part of the population emigrated.
The rebuilding followed new earthquake-resistant rules and, in the town, tried to recreate the Venetian style in squares such as Saint Mark's and Solomos, with their arcades and bell towers raised anew. But the result is, inevitably, a new town: that is why Zakynthos, unlike Corfu (which lay outside the worst-hit area), keeps very little original old architecture. That earthquake is the key to understanding why the 'Florence of Greece' no longer shows its Renaissance palaces, and why much of what is admired on the island today is nature — the sea, the caves, the beaches — rather than old stone. The same quake also devastated neighbouring Kefalonia, with which Zante shares this story of reconstruction.
Before the rebuilding, Zakynthos had lived through another chapter the island remembers with pride. During the Nazi occupation, in 1944, the German authorities demanded that Bishop Chrysostomos and Mayor Loukas Karrer hand over the list of the island's Jews for deportation. According to local tradition, widely documented, the two handed in a sheet of paper with only two names — their own — and hid the Jewish community in inland villages. The roughly 275 Jews of Zakynthos survived the war, an exceptional case in occupied Greece, where most Jewish communities were exterminated. It is a sober and luminous episode in the middle of a terrible time.
After the postwar years and the rebuilding, Zakynthos was transformed, from the 1970s and 1980s, into one of the great sun-and-beach destinations in Greece. Tourism became the island's engine, with the worldwide fame of Navagio (Shipwreck) beach and its turquoise water as the magnet. That success, however, comes with a responsibility: the bay of Laganas is one of the most important nesting sites in the Mediterranean for the caretta caretta turtle, and in 1999 the first National Marine Park in the Mediterranean dedicated to protecting them was created there, with strict rules that seek to reconcile visitors and conservation.
Today Zakynthos is an island of contrasts: the summer bustle of Laganas against the calm of the mountain villages; the crowded postcard of Navagio — today closed to the public because of rockfall risk — against the protected silence of the turtle beaches; mass tourism against a growing environmental awareness. Rebuilt on its own ruins, faithful to its Venetian heritage and to its national poet, the flower of the Ionian goes on flowering, now also as a sanctuary for one of the oldest creatures in the sea.