0Itanos & Erimoupolis Beaches

Itanos beach is in the far north east of Crete bey­ond Sitea. Itanos is actu­ally 3 beaches and is also the same loc­a­tion as the ruins of the ancient town of Itanos. Itanos is just north of the much busier palm beach at Vai.

Itanos usu­ally has a num­ber of people there but it does­n’t get espe­cially busy so it’s per­fect for people who like a peace­ful beach. The road, and the inform­al car­park at the end of it, lead to the middle of the 3 beaches which is the smal­lest, which is barely a beach at all really. The largest beach, also known as Erimou­pol­is beach is imme­di­ately to the north of the cent­ral beach and is the most pop­u­lar. The south­ern beach is a short 250m walk, past the ruins of the ancient town. Unlike a lot of beaches on Crete, all 3 beaches at Itanos are sandy, and the water is beau­ti­fully clear. There are pic­tures of all 3 in the gallery

I had read in sev­er­al places that the ruins of the ancient port are vis­ible under­wa­ter at Itanos so I took a snorkel and mask and swam around quite a bit look­ing but failed to find any­thing much. The only indic­a­tion of any ancient human pres­ence in the bay are a num­ber of rect­an­gu­lar shaped slabs of stone but you will need to do the rest with your ima­gin­a­tion. The ruins on land are how­ever more inter­est­ing. Whilst they don’t com­pare to some­where like Knos­sos they have been left alone unaltered unlike Knossos

The over­head maps make it look like the north beach can be eas­ily accessed from the road just north-west of it, but the road there is cut into the side of a hill and is quite a bit high­er than the beach so it would be dif­fi­cult to get to the beach from here, it is much bet­ter to drive to the inform­al car­park by the cent­ral beach and do the short walk

There are no facil­it­ies at the beach and no water­s­ports or activ­it­ies on offer so if you need toi­lets or food you will have to travel to access them. The nearest place with facil­it­ies is Vai beach 2.5km to the south.

Gallery for Itanos Beaches & Ruins

Map of walk to Erimoupolis (Itanos north) beach

Itanos south beach is a sim­il­ar length walk but google maps does­n’t recog­nise the paths so it isn’t shown below. If you move the map slightly you will see the south beach — the walk is almost a mir­ror of the walk to the north

More info

I reviewed Itanos on Tri­pAd­visor back in 2014 and there are plenty more inform­at­ive reviews there.