Spinalonga, Crete: The Venetian Fortress Island near Elounda
Spinalonga is a small fortress island in the Bay of Elounda off the north-east coast of Crete, famous for its Venetian fortress and for the leper colony that lived there from 1903 to 1957. The fortress island - properly named Kalidonia, though almost everyone calls it Spinalonga after the neighbouring peninsula - lies about a hundred metres off the coast near Elounda, Plaka and Agios Nikolaos, and today it is one of the most-visited sights in Crete. It takes about an hour to walk around the whole island.
- Off
- Elounda, Crete
- Fortress built
- 1579
- Leper colony
- 1903–1957
- From Plaka
- 5 min by boat
The fortress island of Spinalonga
The little island, Kalidonia, sits on the northernmost tip of the Spinalonga peninsula in the Bay of Elounda, about 500 metres long and 200 metres wide and separated from the mainland by roughly a hundred metres of water. The Venetians built its fortress in 1579, and it earned a reputation as unconquerable: when the Turks took the Cretan mainland in 1670, Kalidonia held out for another 45 years, and the Venetians handed it over only in 1715 after agreeing on a free retreat. The Turks broke that agreement, killed the men and sold the rest of the islanders as slaves. On the shallow seabed between Elounda and Spinalonga, archaeologists have found the remains of the ancient Greek city of Olous.
The leper colony (1903–1957)
On the foundations of the fortress a village grew that, in the early 20th century, was inhabited by people with leprosy: to keep the disease out of Crete and the rest of Greece, the sick were sent to the island. At its height around 2,000 patients lived here, adapting the old Turkish houses with whatever they could find. Within the walls stand their houses and their graves - small, about a metre square, because after amputations little was left to bury - and two churches, including Agios Panteleimon of 1709. In 1957 the last patient was moved to a hospital and the island fell empty, its fortress and buildings still in remarkably good shape and under ongoing restoration; on the tower the Venetian lion of Saint Mark is still carved in stone.
How to visit Spinalonga
Boats to Spinalonga run regularly from Agios Nikolaos, Elounda and Plaka. From Plaka the crossing takes only 5 minutes, with a boat leaving about every half hour, and you can return on any boat heading back to Plaka. Trips from Agios Nikolaos are sometimes combined with a swim and a barbecue on Kolokytha beach on the Spinalonga peninsula, where the pillars and ruins of ancient Olous still stand. A boat ticket cost about 8 euros in 2014, and a small entrance fee is charged on the island itself.