Zakynthos

The Εθνικό Θαλάσσιο Πάρκο Ζακύνθου was established in December 1999 — the first park of its kind in Greece, and in the Mediterranean, created for a marine turtle — and covers about a hundred and thirty-five square kilometres, most of which is water. It exists for one animal. Laganas Bay — the shallow bight at the island's southern end, held between the Vasilikos peninsula to the east and the Marathia headland to the west — is the largest single nesting site for the loggerhead turtle, Caretta caretta, in the Mediterranean. Something between nine hundred and two thousand nests are laid there each summer on roughly five kilometres of sand in total; ARCHELON, the Greek sea turtle society that has surveyed the bay since the early 1980s, counted 2,155 nests in 2025, the third strong year in succession.

Six beaches do the work: Gerakas and Daphni at the eastern end, Kalamaki and East Laganas along the middle, the islet of Marathonisi offshore, and Sekania. Sekania is the short one, and it carries what is generally reckoned to be the highest concentration of loggerhead nests anywhere in the world — which is why it is the single beach on Zakynthos closed to the public outright, at any hour, in any season. The bay itself is cut into three marine zones, A, B and C, with fishing prohibited inside all of them. On the beaches that do stay open the rules are uniform and worth knowing in advance: stay within the first five metres from the water, keep fifteen metres off any turtle, and be off the sand at sunset.

The island underneath is young and unsettled. Zakynthos belongs to the Pre-Apulian carbonate zone at the outer edge of the Hellenides; the western half rises along the Vrachionas anticline to 758 metres and falls into the sea as cliff, while the eastern plain that carries the airport, the resorts and the nesting beaches is the low, soft, recent half. On 12 August 1953 the third and worst shock of the Ionian earthquake sequence left only two buildings standing in the island's capital. At Limni Keriou, in the park's western corner, tar still seeps out of the ground: these are the pitch springs Herodotus describes in the fourth book of the Histories, lifted from a pool on a myrtle branch. The park's other half is nowhere near any of this — the Strofades, two low islets called Stamfani and Arpia about forty-four kilometres south-south-east, with a fortified monastery of 1241 on the larger one and two to three thousand pairs of Scopoli's shearwater breeding on both.

The conflict has been continuous and is not resolved. Laganas village counted 766 permanent residents at the 2021 census and has well over a hundred bars and clubs, immediately behind sand that turtles are trying to nest on, and the pressures — beach lighting, sunbeds, night noise, speedboats — are all measurable. On 30 January 2002 the European Court of Justice, in Case C-103/00, Commission v Hellenic Republic, held that Greece had failed to establish and implement an effective system of strict protection for the species on Zakynthos, in breach of Article 12 of the Habitats Directive. The park had existed for two years by then. Enforcement is still the argument, and the conservation NGOs publish a fresh list of breaches most years. Some measures did hold. The airport, which sits a short way behind the nesting beaches, is closed to traffic between ten at night and five in the morning for the turtles' sake — a real constraint on a charter island, and one that occasionally strands a planeload of people for a day.

What's worth knowing before you go

Zakynthos International "Dionysios Solomos" sits 4.3 kilometres from Zakynthos Town, between Kalamaki and Laganas; the alternative is the ferry from Kyllini in the western Peloponnese to the town quay, with a second route from Agios Nikolaos in the north to Kefalonia. Kalamaki and Laganas are the nearest bases and are not interchangeable — Laganas is one of the loudest resort strips in Greece from June to August. Vasilikos at the eastern end is quieter and puts you within walking distance of Gerakas and Daphni; Limni Keriou at the western corner is quieter still and is where the licensed boats leave from. Nesting runs through the summer, the first nests hatch around mid-July — in 2026 the first was on Daphni on the 14th — and September is the better month to come: hatchlings are still emerging, the sea is at its warmest, and the bay has emptied. Remember that the nesting beaches close at sunset, so an evening there is not an option. And Navagio, the cliff-bound cove with the wrecked freighter that supplies most of the island's advertising, is on the north-west coast, reachable only by boat and outside the park altogether.

The hour worth setting an alarm for is first light on Gerakas or Daphni, when the survey team walks the beach reading the previous night's tracks before wind and footprints take them. A female's crawl up and back is unmistakable once someone has shown you the difference between a nesting emergence and a false crawl — and the whole thing is finished and gone by about nine.