By Antonia Quirke • February 14, 2020

With its intoxicating mix of smart stays, dazzling streets and wild beaches, the luminous Greek island of Paros is the bright new star of the Cyclades

Coming out of the dark chapel doorway into the dazzle of a street in the chic port town of Naoussa, my fingers sticky with the beeswax from lighting candles, I realize it is the fourth time today that I have performed such a ritual: the act of ducking between the chatter of this bright island of Paros, and its peace and stillness; and marveling at how quickly both can happen. Two states of being; elemental to idle. Like the moment in a dream when reality switches.

It takes a moment to focus, the sun is so yellow; but when I can see, I think for the thousandth time that this is a shining world, a cascade of crimson bougainvillea down a whitewash of stone. You might point to the other long-established stars of the Cyclades, Mykonos and Santorini, for a similar color scheme, but their atmosphere is different. Crowds and negronis, social whirl and heat. The effect of Paros is distinct.

Someone once said that of all the Greek islands, Paros seems perpetually to have just been washed. No matter how old any sugar-cube pile of white houses or churches (and many are very old), there is a quintessential freshness. This can make history and time – and even reality – a little blurred. Paros is almost implausibly pretty. Lanes can be thickly strewn with flower petals from overhanging ornamental vines. In the village of Podromos, I come across a broom still vertical in the middle of a snowdrift of blossom, as though the sweeper has dissolved.

On a Sunday in late summer, I wake up with one aim: to touch mountain, and sand. The 17th-century village of Lefkes, in the high heart of the 75-square-mile island, was once the capital of Paros, built as an escape from pirates who plagued the Cyclades. Flights of old steps along narrow lanes are worn to a gloss by centuries. Up here at 800ft, where it is cooler than the rest of the island, the vines and olives grow fat on the north-facing slopes. Tangled gardens hang off ravines studded with pomegranate trees and gigantic prickly pear. In the main square, the Stratis bakery sells little cheese-and-lemon pastries to a crowd sitting by an old war memorial with views towards the island’s lowlands, where amber fields of barley give way to an Aegean as polished as a blue enamel tile.

Walking slowly in front of me, an elderly woman carries a grocery bag that oozes red along the cobbles – could it be… blood? But it is just dripping grape juice, staining the stones on a Byzantine path that leads downhill out of town for a couple of miles towards windmills. A popular trail for hikers, this ancient route takes you close to long-abandoned marble quarries where Parian marble was mined in antiquity and exported across the Aegean for temples and sculptures. Called Lychnitis (from the word “Lychnos”, meaning “lamp”), it was especially prized for its luminous qualities. Light appears to be absorbed into its layers and then bounce translucently out.

To the east, in the cosmopolitan hillside village of Marpissa, I have lunch at a homely taverna called Charoula’s, at a table speckled with sun through the leaves of a mulberry tree which fills the square with a rippling light and shade, as though we are at the bottom of the sea. It is so restful, and a pie of fennel and honey so delicious, that I wonder whether to order another. By the time I get to Golden Beach on the south-east coast, the late afternoon is at it hottest and in the little beach bar beyond a cluster of lime trees a family hides out from the glare after a long lunch, ordering iced coffees and puddings from a waitress who picks up a book in spare moments, engrossed.

“Elinor!” demands a little boy with dark curls, pulling at her clothes, “I want more ice-cream.” She smiles. What flavor? “Pink,” he nods. She gazes at his serious angel face and puts down her book – Greek Mythology: Groundbreaking Interpretations. I giggle. Light reading.

Along the mile of sand at Golden Beach are salt-bleached pine trees strung with drying bikinis, and people snoring under cabanas. Over the water, the little island of Dryonisi looks like it is hovering on a layer of pink mist. Many of the beaches along the Paros coastline – upwards of 20 worth visiting – are organized, with sun loungers and restaurants, but some are still wild, such as Kalogeros, found beyond a long dirt road on the east coast, where you can scrape cleansing clay straight from the steep cliffs that encircle the sand and apply it to wet skin. The water there is studded with people in various amused stages of encakement, their torsos a chalky green, waiting for the moment to rush screaming into the waves, wash it off and feel a marvelous smoothness.

That evening come the electric inklings of a brewing storm as I wander around the main town of Parikia, in a protected bay on the west coast of Paros. Thunder and lightning glower behind clouds in the direction of the island of Syros.

Being centrally located in the Cyclades group of islands, accessible and fertile, Paros has been home to many civilizations which have had an impact. Ionians, Persians, Romans, Venetians. Castles, palaces, mosaics. The archaeological museum in downtown Parikia is full of captivating island artifacts dating from antiquity to the Ottoman era, including a disconcertingly lifelike 6BC statue of Gorgo, or Medusa, with scales and boar’s teeth and a snake in one hand.

When I think of Parikia, I think of delicate ancient archways and water fountains of chiseled stone. And of a silversmith with an inscrutable face on Old Market Street who sells religious votive offerings pressed out of metal – symbols of aching hearts and searching eyes. I bought one of a ship laboring against high winds, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave in any chapel with a prayer. (It is now in my kitchen. Is this allowed?) At the back of the old marble factory by the yacht harbor, the new Fluxus modern art gallery is exhibiting its first installation, The Oracle of Paros. This turns out to be a screen on which word combinations flash by too quickly for the human eye to read. Only by taking a photograph – go the instructions – can you capture the words and learn your fate. I take a picture and save it for later.

Outside, children kick footballs against the walls of an ancient cemetery, crowds order souvlaki at a restaurant overlooking stone sarcophagi, and tourists drag suitcases off the last ferry of the day. Families are milling in the lanes around the immense Byzantine-era Church of 100 Doors, built on top of a Temple of Aphrodite (where Christianity and Greek mythology meet). Sitting on a pavement, two young buskers puff on the tsampouna – an ancient Greek instrument like a bagpipe made of goatskin – tapping bare, tattooed feet. Impassive old men play backgammon, and from the darker reaches of the streets comes the faint smell of jasmine, little birds chirruping and fluttering about as though it is the middle of the afternoon. Suddenly remembering my photograph, I fish out my phone… but the image has somehow been deleted. I wonder if this is ominous. Possibly best not to trust oracles. Look what happened to Oedipus.

It doesn’t rain, and in the morning the clouds have vanished as if they had never been there at all. Increasingly, drought dogs the Cyclades, and you won’t find anyone on the islands not obsessed with water. Drier slopes on the island are covered in thorny scrub the color of mink, nicknamed Fonos, or “murder” (Aphrodite’s lover once cut his feet on this stuff). In places the Parian landscape can be bony and hard, as tough as it is lovely, as if it is teaching you a lesson about beauty. Truman Capote’s boyfriend Jack Dunphy recalls in his memoir of 1987 the couple’s delighted summer on the island some 30 years before, just after Capote had written Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “That was nice, that was lovely, that was free and easy…” writes Dunphy, with an implied sigh. Most keenly he remembers the time he chased a donkey near Parikia and fell, scraping himself on rocks, leaving a lifelong scar. “But it’s a happy scar now, when I look at it, Truman.”

On Antiparos – the sunbaked small island just 10 minutes by small ferry from Pounda on the west coast – I go looking for a rockscape I have been told might as well be coral stacked up by the gods. Walking along the main street of the one town, it is full of women in gauzy kaftans stopping at boutiques and turning over trinkets. All around is the sound of scraping chairs and conversation from restaurants, but in a quiet side street there is a bookshop called ARODO stacked with secondhand books in all languages – 1950s thrillers, biographies of Alexander Pushkin, the plays of Sophocles. Paperbacks by Simone Signoret, thick with salt. Every available space is piled.

“Where do you get all these?” I ask Maria, the owner, and she talks about her late father, Stelios, who started with a bookstore in Athens and then opened another here in the 1980s, figuring there were always interesting people coming and going on Antiparos, wanting a book for the summer or for the ferry. “He was the classic bookshop owner,” sighs Maria.

“He knew all the things about authors, he read all the time. And now: I read.”

Afterwards I drive south beyond Soros beach (there is a superb taverna just before you get there, called Peramataki – order their fava bean dip and a thick-crusted homemade pie). Down the coast, the thistle and scrub are dense, the rocks becoming bone-bleached and sharper, the sand along tiny coves sugary and empty save for the odd parasol or couple of swimmers under sheaves and sheaves of light.

It is breathtaking, a stark splendor that gives me a stab of longing. It makes me think about Elinor with her book of Greek myths. When I’d asked her before leaving the beach bar which was her favorite story, she had said something profound: “Jason and the Golden Fleece. Because it represents Greek culture today.

We are the fleece.” We are the fleece. We are the most desired thing, the thing that people will travel continents to possess, even for a few days. How rare and precious such places are – how increasingly fragile. How careful we must be with them.

Eventually I find the rockscape I am looking for. It looks like a kind of prehistoric atoll, or maybe even a fallen crater of the moon, filled with water of glistening brilliance. A few teenagers are making roll-ups on its shore, bracelets jangling on their wrists, lying lazily back on the sand and squinting at the sun.

Just one thing left to tell you. When I get back to London, I email the Fluxus gallery and explain about my disappearing message, asking whether they might perhaps take a photo on my behalf. They very kindly oblige. And what does the oracle tell me? “The clouds below you are tame, the clouds above, wild.”

Ha! That is so Paros, I think. Social whirl and serenity; elemental and idle. Dim chapels, dazzling streets; and that precious moment in between – a moment nothing short of divine – when the world can seem not just like a dream, but a dream of itself.

3 of the best hotels in Paros

COSME

This beachfront hotel with 40 suites is within ambling distance of the stylish little town of Naoussa, on the north coast of the island. Open and airy, Cosme (left) presents itself to the breeze off the Aegean with large terraces and walkways that can feel like boulevards (planted with great fragrant, oily rosemary bushes, pomegranate and lemon) but also subtle touches that lend privacy and hush to the hotel. There are linen curtains draped around daybeds overlooking the infinity pool, and a breakfast area tucked away from the sea where you can enjoy a quiet bowl of something and plan your day before the (very) short walk to the immediacy of rolling waves and the hotel’s own yellow beach. The food here is outstanding – modern Greek, crisp, clever: calamari with a fennel pesto that heightens and sweetens the seafood; or a pretty rice pudding (a staple dish of these islands) layered with apricot, almond and thyme – both dream dishes, especially when followed by the house mountain herbal tea.

ADRONIS MINOIS

A short drive from Parikia and curled discreetly into a cliff, this friendly hotel has 44 suites, many of them charming and with their own little pool (right) that stretches coolly beyond the bedroom – good for a night swim or a pre-breakfast plunge, or the perfect retreat from the afternoon heat. Many island hotels try to recreate the feel of being in a Parian village, and Adronis Minois does achieve a sense of this – honeysuckle along white squares and external corridors, guests gathering to sit and chat at sundown, when candles are lit leading the way down to the big dining terrace. The views from here, of two sharp rocks known locally as The Doors, have majesty. A Greek salad with Xynomizithra (a local sour cheese), very fragrant tomatoes, and barley rusks is an absolutely essential order.

PARILIO

The grounds of Parilio (left) – the chicest hotel on Paros – are planted with flowers and grasses that give the immediate and unusual feel of a temple site that has sprung out of a meadow. Suites are quiet and very private (you sense the walls are thick), built into gardens like retreats. The locus of the energy is the dining terrace and bar arranged around a hotel pool that is pronged by a huge white boulder, there to impersonate the unusual rock formations at the nearby, stunning beach of Kolympithres. Ask the hotel to arrange a trip to Petra Farm – family-run, organic and producing its own wine and oil, an increasingly hard achievement in the water-poor Cyclades. Add to that the southern winds, full of salt, and you would think it impossible to grow anything – but the Petra orange wine especially has an exquisite, heady minerality (the farm makes only 1,000 bottles a year) that is perfect paired with the salty, fermented Parian cheese graviera.