Matala: Caves, Hippies and the Beach That Made It Famous

Joni Mitchell wrote "Carey" here, under the cliff where she lived in a cave through the spring of 1970. That single fact explains most of what you will find in Matala today: the painted slogans, the ageing VW vans in the car park, the annual beach festival, and a village of a few hundred people that built its whole identity around one short, strange chapter when the world's hippies decided a fishing hamlet on the Libyan Sea was the end of the road.

The caves

The famous caves pock the northern cliff of the bay in tidy rows, and they are far older than the flower-power story suggests. Most were cut in the Roman and early Christian periods, probably as tombs, which lends a certain dark comedy to the fact that travellers later moved in with sleeping bags and guitars. The colony lasted from the mid 1960s until the authorities and the church lost patience in the early 1970s. Today the cliff is a fenced archaeological site with a small entrance fee; check the hours locally, climb the worn steps, and look back across the bay from a doorway carved two thousand years ago.

The beach and its neighbours

Matala bay itself earns its reputation: 300 metres of sand and fine pebble, water that deepens quickly to proper swimming, and the sun setting directly into the sea between the headlands, an event the beach bars treat as a nightly performance. When the main beach fills, locals walk twenty minutes over the red rock to the north, to the appropriately named Red Beach, smaller, clothing-optional by custom, and reached only by that scramble. Just up the coast, Kommos stretches long and half-empty below an unexcavated Minoan harbour town, with loggerhead turtles nesting at its quiet end.

More than the beach

The Minoan palace of Phaistos sits ten minutes inland on its hilltop above the Messara plain, and pairing the two is the classic move: ruins in the cooler morning, Matala in the afternoon. Our guide to Phaistos and the Minoan south explains why many archaeologists prefer it to Knossos. The carpet of greenhouses and olive groves you cross on the way feeds half of Greece, and the farming villages along the road, Pitsidia and Sivas especially, keep tavernas that out-cook anything on the waterfront.

The practical bit

Matala lies about 70 kilometres southwest of Heraklion, a drive of roughly an hour and a quarter across the island. A transfer from Heraklion Airport to Matala is the painless version; the public bus involves a change in Mires and a generous attitude to schedules. June's Matala Beach Festival fills every room within miles, so book far ahead or pick another week. And if the hippie nostalgia wears thin, remember the village motto painted on the harbour wall, "Today is life, tomorrow never comes", then go and read about the rest of the south coast beaches, because the philosophy travels well.