Damouchari

Where it sits. Damouchari is a hamlet of a few dozen houses on the eastern, Aegean-facing coast of the Pelion peninsula in Thessaly, about 55 kilometres from Volos by a road that climbs over the mountain ridge and then drops through chestnut and plane forest to the sea. It occupies the only natural harbour on this entire stretch of coast — a small rock-walled inlet with a pocket of deep water that fishing boats can lie in when the north-easterly is running, which is the reason a settlement exists here at all. Two pebble coves sit either side of a low headland, and on that headland stand the fragmentary walls of a small medieval fort, usually attributed to the Venetian period, now reduced to a few courses of stone among the cactus.

Pelion, briefly. The mountain behind is Pelion, 1,624 metres at Pourianos Stavros, and in myth it was the home of the centaurs and the place where Peleus married the sea-nymph Thetis, whose son was Achilles. The peninsula is one of the greenest corners of Greece: beech and chestnut forest, apple and walnut orchards, and villages of grey-slate roofs and whitewashed stone hanging on the slope hundreds of metres above the sea. Damouchari belongs to the community of Mouresi, three kilometres up the hill, and is linked to it and to the neighbouring village of Agios Ioannis by kalderimia, the cobbled mule paths that were the only transport network here until the twentieth century and are now the best walking in Thessaly.

On screen. Damouchari is the harbour village of Mamma Mia!, and this is where the confusion in the film's geography lives. The 2008 production split its Greek exteriors across three places: Skopelos supplied the beach at Kastani and the wedding chapel of Agios Ioannis sto Kastri, Skiathos was the second Sporades base, and Damouchari — on the mainland, not on any island — gave the film its quayside. The stone lanes, the little harbour and the pebble shore carry the sequences where the village crowd streams down to the water; the taverna set-dressing went up on the waterfront and came down again afterwards. Donna's hotel, meanwhile, was never a building at all: it was constructed as a set on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios in England, and no amount of walking around Damouchari will find it. Visitors who booked Skopelos to see the harbour, or who arrive here looking for the chapel, are working from a map the film deliberately never drew.

What you actually see today. Very little has been built. Cars stop in a parking area above the inlet and the last few hundred metres are on foot down a stone ramp, which is what keeps the place feeling like a working cove rather than a resort. The northern beach is coarse grey pebble with clear, cold water and a rocky seabed that makes for the best snorkelling on this coast; the southern one is smaller and more sheltered. A handful of tavernas and two or three small stone-built hotels make up the commercial life, several of them trading openly on the film. Behind the harbour a natural rock pool fills at high water, and a short scramble north along the shore reaches sea caves that are swimmable in calm conditions. In the evening the sun goes off the water early because the mountain stands directly behind, which is worth knowing if you plan to swim late.

Walks from the door. The kalderimi to Mouresi climbs about 250 metres in a little over two kilometres, cobbled almost the whole way, shaded, and finishing at a plane-tree square with a spring. Another path runs north along the shore to Papa Nero and Agios Ioannis in twenty-five minutes, and a longer route heads inland to Tsagkarada, whose central square holds a plane tree claimed to be a thousand years old with a trunk more than fifteen metres in girth. Further inland the narrow-gauge Pelion railway, built between 1895 and 1903 to a track gauge of 600 millimetres with the Italian engineer Evaristo de Chirico — father of the painter Giorgio de Chirico — on the design team, still runs a summer tourist service from Ano Lechonia to Milies.

Getting there and timing. Volos is the gateway: an hour and a half by car over the ridge via Tsagkarada, or a slower bus that runs a few times daily to Mouresi and Agios Ioannis, from which Damouchari is a walk. The nearest airports are Volos-Nea Anchialos, which handles seasonal charters, and Thessaloniki, three hours away. The coast road is narrow, steep and switchbacked; caravans and nervous drivers should take the inland route. Swimming season runs from June to early October, with the water warmest in late August. In winter the hamlet is close to empty and several tavernas shut, but Pelion in snow, with the villages above the cloud line, is a genuinely different destination.