Myrtos Beach

Where it sits. Myrtos occupies a north-west facing bay in the Pylaros district of Cephalonia, wedged between the feet of two mountains — Agia Dynati at 1,125 metres and Kalon Oros at 901 — where their ridges run out into the Ionian Sea. The bay is a kilometre-long crescent enclosed by white limestone walls several hundred metres high, and it is the geology, not any embellishment, that produces the colour the beach is famous for. The shore is not sand but fine white pebble and pulverised limestone, and the seabed is the same material; light entering the water scatters off it and comes back as a graded band of white, aquamarine, turquoise and finally deep indigo where the shelf drops away. From the road above, that gradient is visible as a set of distinct stripes.

The view before the beach. Most people meet Myrtos twice. The first encounter is from the Argostoli–Fiskardo road near Divarata, where a series of laybys sit roughly 250 to 300 metres directly above the bay and give the aerial composition that appears on every poster of the Ionian Islands. This is the sunset spot on this coast: the bay faces north-west, so the sun goes down over open water beyond the headland of Cape Athera and lights the cliffs orange for the last half hour. The second encounter is the descent — a steep, narrow, switchbacked lane just under two kilometres long, cut into the cliff face with a couple of blind hairpins, dropping to a car park behind the shingle.

What the beach is actually like. There is no village at Myrtos and almost no development: a seasonal canteen, showers, toilets, a lifeguard station in high summer and rows of loungers in the central section, with plenty of unclaimed pebble at either end. The water is cold — this coast is deep and exposed — and it deepens abruptly a few metres out. Undertow and shore break are real here, and the beach has a poor safety record when the north-westerly is running, so the flag system deserves attention; on calm mornings it is superb swimming. The cliffs behind are actively unstable. Landslides and rockfalls have closed sections of the beach and the access road on several occasions, most seriously after the January and February 2014 earthquakes that shook the north of the island, and the fenced-off zones under the walls are marked for good reason.

On screen. Myrtos supplies the landscape shots in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, John Madden's 2001 film of the Louis de Bernières novel starring Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz. The production's built work was elsewhere on Cephalonia — a 1940s village set on the waterfront at Sami, and the Italian garrison camp staged at Antisamos bay — but the wide coastal imagery that gave the film its reputation for beauty came largely from this side of the island. Visitors who arrive expecting to find the film's village at Myrtos will not find anything at all: the bay has no buildings, and never had.

Practical detail. The turning is signposted at Divarata, 30 kilometres north of Argostoli on the main road to Fiskardo and about 12 kilometres west of Agia Efimia. There is no bus to the beach itself; the Fiskardo bus stops at Divarata, from which it is a hot forty-minute walk down and an unpleasant hour back up, so a car, scooter or taxi is the realistic option. The car park fills by ten in the morning in August and the lane is too narrow for comfortable two-way traffic when it does. Bring water and food, because the canteen is small and closes out of season, and bring beach shoes: the pebbles are large, rounded and hard on bare feet, and they also hold heat.

Timing the light. Because of the enclosing walls, the bay is in shadow early — by late afternoon in spring and autumn the sun is already off the water, and the colour that draws photographers is essentially a midday phenomenon, between roughly eleven and four. That works against the usual advice to avoid the middle of the day, and it means the best plan is a late-morning swim, lunch up at Divarata, and a return to the clifftop viewpoint for the evening. June and September deliver warm water without the August press; in July and August the beach receives coachloads from the cruise arrivals at Sami and Argostoli and can hold well over a thousand people. Out of season it is often deserted, but the access road can be closed after storms and the canteen is shuttered from late October.