A  comprehensive listing of most of the island’s beaches. Check out our hints and tips

Andros has many beautiful beaches with crystal water. Some of them are organized with sea beds, umbrellas, fish restaurants and beach accommodation, while many other bays are totally isolated.
However, all the beaches offer a relaxing atmosphere, ideal for a summer vacation. 

Agios Petros beach and Golden beach are the most organized sandy beaches. They are very close, to our hotel.

Among other beautiful beaches are: Zorgos, Vitali, Achla and Vlychada but the road to these beaches is a little rough.

Trying the magnificent local cuisine is a must and so is reading the information we’ve gathered for you.

Gastronomy in Andros is characterized by the main elements of Greek and Cycladic cuisine. Natural products, fresh fruits and vegetables, local cheeses, traditional recipes and delicious desserts will be included in all of your meals during your holidays in this beautiful island.

So don’t look for blinis and caviar. Instead, seek out the specialty shops with local delicacies like a wide range of honeys, lemon blossom jam, cheeses soft and hard, preserved capers and caper leaves, and amygdalota (crushed almond) and kaltsounia (crushed walnut) confections covered with powdered sugar and rosewater.

You’ll find such goodies in two shops almost across from each other on the main gray-marble-paved street in Hora: Rodozachari and the tiny Paradosiako Pantopoleio (“Traditional Grocers”), whose decorative baskets hang above the entrance.

Our favorite, though, is Yannis Batis’s funky Andriotiko Pantopoleio at the south end of the island’s port, Gavrio. There you can not only shop, you can sit with an ouzo, boutique beer or a Cycladic wine and sample some of the artisanal cheeses and charcuterie that Batis brings from neighboring islands like Naxos, Tinos, Serifos, Syros and even Ios or Samothrace.

From there it’s only a few steps to Yorgos Sigalas’s mezedopoleio, Karavostasi, the last establishment on this end of the port.

Open four or five years now, Karavostasi is the most recent addition to our list of the best places to eat on Andros. We love it for Sigalas’s handsome, smiling presence but also for his repertoire of seafood dishes: keftedes or fritters from almost any substance you can imagine – from zukes to tomato, cheese, octopus, mussels, potato and even meat – copious salads and the opulent fisherman’s spaghetti. Sigalas caught the restaurant bug while working as a waiter in the evenings, assimilating the best tricks of the trade while inheriting kitchen skills from his father, who was a ship’s cook.

We prefer this quieter south end of the port to the main waterfront strip, where most of Gavrio’s cafés, shops and eateries are concentrated.

Heading out of Gavrio to the west will take you down to Fellos Beach or up to Ano Fellos and Kossis’s taverna, which in the 15 years since its inauguration has become the most popular meatery on the island.

Like so many Andriots, Dimitris (Mitsos) Kossis had started out as a sailor but he quit to become a farmer. Three kids later, he decided to open a taverna to make ends meet. And unusually, he chose a gully just off the main road to the sparsely populated northwest as his location.

Now, despite its relatively remote location, it attracts diners from as far away as Hora. Kossis has remained a farmer. He still raises cows and sheep, which supply milk for fresh homemade cheese and delectable lamb chops, and he grows many of the taverna’s vegetables. He even has a few horses for children to ride up and down the courtyard while their parents savor a prolonged meal.

Kossis’s greatest assets have been his flexibility, charm and wonderful family. When some of his British regulars told him about aging meat, he listened and adapted his menu to include superlative tender steaks cooked to order, even rare – a difficult concept for most Greeks. The interiors are attractively rustic, free carafes of tsipouro arrive with the place settings, and the service is always carried out with a smile by Kossis’s engaging sons, Yannis and Panagiotis. Apart from the chops and steaks, we recommend the liver and barbecued chicken, but if you’re not into meat, the sides of salads, fried zucchini and eggplant, saganaki (fried cheese), thick tzatziki, oil-drizzled grilled bread and crisp fried potatoes will more than satisfy you.

Heading east out of Gavrio will take you along the coast to a series of pleasant beaches. Here at Agios Petros, maybe 10 minutes from the port, is Yiannoulis, whose garrulous owner started it as a café in the late ’50s. Yiannoulis (little Yannis) had been a seafarer, too, until a shipwreck convinced him to keep his feet on dry land, or so his wife, Katina, told us. Sitting in the kitchen wrapping chard leaves into dolmades as she’s done since their marriage in ’62, she told us how the café quickly expanded into the taverna, where Andriots have been congregating ever since.

Whether you’ve been swimming or are driving to Gavrio to catch the ferry, Yiannoulis is an oasis of shade, good service and specialties such as froutalia, the island’s famous omelet with sausage, preserved pork and fried potatoes, zucchini flower croquettes (kolokythopoula), baked eggplant, keftedes, those and other types of dolmades, beautifully cooked fresh fish when available and artichokes and broad beans from their garden in spring. Poppi, Katina and Yiannoulis’s daughter, runs the kitchen now; her husband and her brother, both named Niko, are efficient, cordial waiters. Ask for doppioor local cheese instead of feta to go with your village salad.

After Gavrio, the next village is Batsi, a former fishing hamlet that collects most of the island’s tourists. You can get a good idea of what it used to look like by examining the black-and-white photos on the walls in Stamatis’s taverna, up the steps opposite the little marina at the south end of town. Stamatis, another institution, opened in 1965, and the décor has not changed since we discovered it in the ’80s. Then, its only drawback was the absence of a view, but recently Stamatis’s son, Yannis, and his Greek-American wife, Callie, acquired a balcony-like room opposite which overlooks the port and makes summer dining more romantic. Try the kleftiko, slow-cooked lamb or chicken, or lamb with the traditional Andros Easter stuffing of rice, eggs, herbs and green onions and fresh fish from a large menu of familiar Greek dishes. Yannis prides himself on his lobster makaronada, too. Until he joined his father, the only seafood served was the humble gopa, whose comical scientific name is Boops boops.

Up till now Stamatis was the one restaurant on Andros that never shut.

Hints & tips

At Hora of Andros you will visit:

The Archaeological Museum of Andros, +30 22820 23664
The Museum of Contemporary Art , +30 22820 22444
The Maritime Museum of +30 22820 22275
The Museum of Traditional Arts and Byzantine Icons +30 22820 22189
The Digital Museum of Andros +30 22823 60200

At Pitrofos village:
The Cyclades Olive Museum, +30 6932731776

At Paleopolis village:
The Archaeological Museum of Palaeopolis +30 22820 41985