Kefalonia

Where it sits. Cephalonia — Kefalonia in the modern Greek spelling — is the largest of the Ionian Islands, about 780 square kilometres of limestone lying west of the Gulf of Patras with Ithaca a few kilometres off its eastern shore and Zakynthos to the south. Its shape is awkward and memorable: a long body with two arms enclosing the deep bay of Argostoli, so that the drive from one coastal village to another often means an hour inland and back. Mount Ainos runs down the spine to 1,628 metres, high enough to hold snow into spring and to be visible from the Peloponnese. About 35,000 people live here, concentrated in Argostoli, Lixouri, Sami and Poros.

The earthquake that made the island look the way it does. On 12 August 1953 a magnitude 7.2 earthquake, the largest of a destructive sequence, levelled almost every settlement on Cephalonia and neighbouring Zakynthos. Argostoli, Lixouri and Sami were essentially destroyed, tens of thousands emigrated, and the rebuilding — much of it aided by foreign governments — produced the low, plain, concrete towns that surprise visitors expecting Venetian arcades. The exceptions matter: Fiskardo, at the northern tip, largely escaped the shaking and preserves a waterfront of eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses in ochre and pink, and Asos on the west coast kept enough of its fabric to be reconstructed in the old idiom. Understanding 1953 explains almost everything about the built environment here.

On screen. Cephalonia is the setting and the location of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, John Madden's 2001 adaptation of the Louis de Bernières novel, with Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz. The production shot on the island in 2000, building its period village on the waterfront at Sami — the real Argostoli of the 1940s no longer existed to be filmed — and using the bay at Antisamos, over the headland east of Sami, for the Italian garrison's camp. Myrtos and the west-coast cliffs supply the film's landscape. The history underneath the story is not fiction: after Italy's capitulation in September 1943 the men of the Italian 33rd Acqui Division were disarmed and thousands were executed by German forces on this island, an atrocity commemorated by memorials near Argostoli and above Sami. The film drew a wave of visitors from 2001 onward and permanently changed the island's summer economy.

Geology, water and wine. Cephalonia is karst, and it does strange things with water. At the Katavothres near Argostoli, seawater pours into fissures in the shoreline and disappears; dye-tracing experiments in the 1960s proved that it crosses beneath the island and re-emerges fifteen kilometres away at Karavomylos and in the Melissani cave near Sami, having mixed with fresh groundwater on the way. Melissani itself is a collapsed cavern with a lake reached by boat, at its best around midday when the sun drops through the open roof. Drogarati, nearby, is a stalactite chamber with acoustics good enough that concerts are staged in it. On the slopes of Ainos, the Robola grape produces a dry, mineral white with its own protected designation, worked by a growers' cooperative at Omala that receives visitors.

Ainos and the wild coast. The summit ridge is a national park, declared in 1962, protecting the endemic Greek fir Abies cephalonica, which grows in a dark stand that gave the mountain its old Venetian name of Monte Nero. A road climbs to the antenna station near the top and a network of trails runs the ridge; semi-wild horses graze the clearings. Argostoli itself is worth an hour for the De Bosset causeway, a stone bridge of nearly 700 metres thrown across the lagoon in 1813 by the Swiss-born British officer Charles Philippe de Bosset and still the longest stone bridge standing over sea water anywhere. Below Ainos, the beaches are the island's headline: Myrtos on the north-west coast, Petani on the Paliki peninsula, Antisamos and Makris Gialos near Lassi. Loggerhead turtles nest on the southern beaches around Skala and Kaminia, and monk seals use the sea caves on the west coast.

Getting there and timing. Kefalonia airport sits nine kilometres south of Argostoli and takes seasonal European charters plus year-round domestic flights from Athens. Ferries cross from Kyllini in the Peloponnese to Poros and Argostoli, from Patras to Sami, and from Astakos to Sami; short hops link Fiskardo to Ithaca and Lefkada. A car is close to essential — distances are long, the roads are good but winding, and bus coverage is thin. July and August are hot and busy, particularly around Fiskardo and Assos; May, June, September and early October give warm sea, open tavernas and roads you can actually enjoy. Winter is wet: this is one of the rainiest corners of Greece, which is exactly why it is so green.