Now is the time to start fantasising about next summer’s sunshine, says Darius Sanai. And heaven on earth may be nearer to hand than you might think
The leaves are falling, darkness starts to rule Europe and the drizzle is turning chilly; yet now is when our thoughts are turning to our next summer holiday. That’s according to decades of travel industry research that shows that winter is when people book their summer holidays, and autumn is when they sit on the sofa with a bottle of Burgundy and ponder where to go. (This is despite the much-heralded advent of the last-minute break.)
Just under two decades or so ago, the Mediterranean seemed ready to slip off that list of desirable summer holiday ponderings. The discovery and development of regions and resorts around the world, and the arrival of cheap flights, meant a wealth of choice, from Malaysia to Miami, from Cape Town to Cabo San Lucas, opened up to us. Why go to Spain for a holiday when you could go to Sumatra, the thinking went. It seemed for a while that the Med would be taken over by red English package tourists and stingy Dutch caravanners.
But Europe has fought back. While exotic resorts have proliferated around the world, the Mediterranean has not stood still either. St Tropez reinvented itself as the party ground of a new generation. Ibiza was uncovered. A new Greek island became fashionable every year. Italian glitterari never stopped going to the Lipari islands. Meanwhile political developments meant thousands of miles of undiscovered coastline opened up. Dalmatia is the new Greece. Albania is the new Dalmatia.
And we also discovered that the rest of the world isn’t always that great either – especially between July and September. Florida? Humidity, rain and hurricanes. The Caribbean? Even more so. Bali? Monsoons. Cape Town? Mid-winter. Australia? Ditto. California works, but it’s a damned long way to go to look at fat people. In fact, if you’re going on holiday in summer, you may just be blessed. You may live within plane-hopping distance of the most beautiful, culturally varied, climactically perfect, gastronomically delectable, socially fascinating summer holiday destination the world has ever known: the Mediterranean.
To help you plan summer 2009, as you sit warming your toes and dreaming of sunshine and bikinis (either wearing them or looking at people who do), I embarked on a tour of the Holiday Mediterranean, from the traditional to the new.
First stop: Tuscany. Toscana was a destination on the Grand Tour of the 18th century, although English habitues did well to steer clear of the actual coast. Until a hundred years ago, Tuscany’s seaside region, the Maremma, was largely a malaria-ridden marsh, with very little human development. Since the disease was eradicated, the area has developed delightfully slowly. There are none of the high-rise concrete jungles that so blight the Spanish coast, a few hundred miles opposite: just stretches of pineta, or pine forest, lining sandy beaches for miles at a time. These are interspersed with ugly port towns, like Livorno, and delightful, traditional villages, like Marina di Castagneto Carducci.
Marina di C is in a time-warp, stuck in a Jacques Tati film from the 1950s. Families swarm around between pine forest and playgrounds on bicycles; lunches take place on wooden tables under the trees, or on basic terraces outside shack-like buildings. The main street, parallel to the bustling beach, is the only real street, and it’s lined with ice-cream parlours, pizzerias and shops selling buckets, spades and postcards. It’s a thriving holiday resort, but a place more different to the Greek and Spanish hells packing in nightclubs and ‘drink all you can’ bars cannot be imagined. This is a resort where you can leave your eight-year-olds to go off and buy ice cream and come back to your villa without any fear.
Set on one side of the resort is the Tombolo Talasso Resort, a low-rise development distinguished by its gates to keep the hoi polloi out of the gardens. It’s a five-star hotel in name but more functional than luxurious: rooms are in clean greys and whites, our balcony had a wonderful view over the beach to the sea, crowds are not in evidence, and the seawater therapy treatments in the ‘grotto’ spa are famous.
Even more attractive, for me, was the wine list, for Tombolo is owned by the Antinori clan, Tuscany’s most famous winemaking family, behind famed wines like Tignanello, Solaia, and Villa Antinori. We sat on the balcony and feasted on Tuscan cheese and a delicious bottle of Antinori’s Brunello di Montalcino Pian delle Vigne 2001. The Tombolo also has its own private stretch of beach, with its own sunloungers, which is considerably less congested than the rather overrun public spaces.
The joy of this area is that you can combine coast with countryside so quickly, and an hour’s drive took us to Castello del Nero, a dramatically refurbished 15th-century former monastery on a hilltop inland. The Castello has views across Tuscany to the Apennine mountains, a 25m outdoor pool that’s perfect for laps, carefully created bedrooms, and delightful staff. It also has something unique in Tuscany, a spa run by relaxtion-meisters Espa. The routine went: laps of the pool, sunbathe, jump into the hydrotherapy pool with its jets firing massage blasts of water at every muscle, sunlounger, pool.
In the evenings, you can relax on the massive terrace, take in the views across this most beautiful of regions, breathe in the olive groves and thyme, and sip a glass of prosecco, looking towards the towers of Siena, as the sky turns purple and stars erupt out of the blackness. Nearby is one of Tuscany’s finest, simple osterias serving perfectly savoury Bistecca alla Fiorentina, the Osteria la Piazza, a Tuscan restaurant in the middle of nowhere at all.
If Tuscany is traditional, the island is modern-traditional. The beauty of Mallorca was first revealed to the world by famous visitors like Frédéric Chopin in the 19th century; the British poet Robert Graves moved there some 50 years later. A few decades after that, Mallorca’s touristic star was on the wane, as wave after wave of German and British tourists swept in on the package holiday tide of the 1960s and 1970s; local authorities failed to impose planning controls and a concrete blight started to eat into the coast.
The wealthy and sophisticated never lost faith in Mallorca, however: in the mountains running along the western side of the country are some of Europe’s most expensive holiday homes, and the town of Deia, Graves’ home, remains a hub of literary activity. The island is also home to some of Europe’s most entrancing country hotels, like Son Net, set on a hillside in a quiet valley, yet only 20 minutes from Palma, the capital.
Mallorca’s government is now trying to attract a higher class of tourist, and judging by the proliferation of fine hotels and restaurants on the island, is largely succeeding. My aim was to discover whether Mallorca’s coast boasted a resort hotel of world class (something it has lacked in the past) and to that end I went to stay at the St Regis Mardavall, 10 minutes from Palma.
I admit I was sceptical on the journey there: the St Regis was not far from the unprepossessing resort area of Magaluf, after all. My scepticism melted as I entered a high atrium draped in white curtains; the room was as large and sumptuous as anything in a luxury resort in the Far East; and around the three-tier pool was something in extremely short supply in the Med: space. The main drawback of Mediterranean coastal resort hotels, even the best ones, is a lack of space, meaning you end up tripping over Jurgen from Munchen every time you go for a stroll. The Mardavall had acres of space, literally, with loungers set in pairs amid rolling lawns with fabulous views of sea and mountain. The ‘butler’ service was superbly attentive; ice-cold beer and rose wine arrived regularly. An evening in the terrace restaurant, Es Fum, revealed an unexpected gastronomic brilliance, with local seafood treated with sympathy and invention. This is a true destination resort hotel: congratulations to St Regis for creating something so fine on a coast formerly bereft of such a luxury experience.
Croatia is the new Greece, and Hvar is the new St Tropez, or so goes the mixed-metaphor cliché. Hvar is an island off Croatia’s coast, and Hvar Town is its most picturesque (though not its largest) settlement. As my Sunseeker zoomed across the water from the city of Split, where my plane had landed, I didn’t know what to expect. Preconceptions of crumbling Communist infrastructure infesting the view themselves crumbled as the journey turned into a breathtaking cruise between forested islands, many of them uninhabited. Some were tiny, others rose up into brooding mountainsides, but every angle was breathtaking: every gap between island revealed another island in the distance, and precious little development at all.
‘The New St Tropez’ is a label applied by marketeers to anywhere vaguely pleasant by the sea with a bit of sun and glamour, and I can testify that Hvar Town is not like St Tropez at all. It’s much prettier; the first view of it, as you sail into the harbour, is of gorgeous, ancient Venetian buildings backed by forested hills. It’s like finding a new part of Venice, without the litter. Cars are banned from this tiny, chichi, old town; the central piazza is lined with beautifully adorned restaurants, with no garish signs anywhere.
Hvar has two boutique chic hotels facing each other across the harbour, the Adriana and the Riva. Both feel very directional, with gorgeous guests sipping champagne and nibbling on sashimi in their outside terrace bars. My room at the Riva was small, welldesigned and perfectly formed. The Adriana has a rooftop pool which is very urban-cool; Hvar’s only drawback is its lack of beach space. I did what the locals do and jumped into the incredibly clear sea from a rock; the Croatian Adriatic has the cleanest water of the Mediterranean Basin, and it felt thrilling to swim along the coastline.
So there you have it: traditional, modern or contemporary, the Med has everything. Wrap up and start planning now.
ESSENTIALS
www.grandhoteltombolo.com
www.castello-del-nero.com
www.mardavall-hotel.com
www.sonnet.es
