0Ostria, Thalassa & Paplinou Beaches

Pap­lin­ou Beach is a beach on the south east coast a little to the east of Iera­petra. The west­ern end of the beach is for vis­it­ors and is offi­cially known as Thalassa after the beach bar loc­ated there (not to be con­fused with the resort near Chania), whilst the east­ern end is for people booked at the resort and is usu­ally referred to as Ostria beach. The beach is long and the water is excel­lent and there is plenty of off-road park­ing available.
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0Balos Lagoon

Balos Lagoon is one of the most famed beaches on Crete with it’s west coast loc­a­tion offer­ing great sun­sets. It is loc­ated off the pen­in­sula at the north west of the Island a little over an hour from Chania near the Gram­vousa islands which often fea­ture on boat trips to Balos.
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0Making the most of the beach

Most people vis­it­ing Crete for a hol­i­day will be plan­ning to vis­it the beach. There isn’t much needed for a quick dip in the sea oth­er than swim­wear and a tow­el, but there are oth­er things you might want to think about tak­ing to enhance the exper­i­ence, espe­cially if you plan to spend lots of time on the beach
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0Boat trips & surrounding islets

Crete has nearly 100 smal­ler islands sur­round­ing it and many of these can be vis­ited with reg­u­lar boat trips or with a private hire. Some of the islands are pro­tec­ted nation­al parks (called Kri-kri) though and can­’t or should­n’t be vis­ited. Many of the less­er known islets are also hard to identi­fy with even google maps not show­ing names. Whilst we may have some sep­ar­ate pages for the most pop­u­lar islands to vis­it, here we sum­mar­ise details for all the islands for those people who like to explore a bit fur­ther from the beaten track
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0Vai & Psili Ammos beaches

Vai beach is one of the best known beaches on Crete, famed for being sur­roun­ded by a forest of palm trees — often mar­keted as Europe’s last palm forest. The beach itself is on the east coast and is fairly isol­ated from most resorts but it is easy to reach by car and coach trips also run there.
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0Crete in 1964

The Inter­net is great for turn­ing up old for­got­ten con­tent, and this is a par­tic­u­larly great example — a Brit­ish Pathe video of Crete from 1964. The most strik­ing thing is how much remains the same, espe­cially when vis­it­ing out­side of the peak season.
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