Santa Marina Mykonos remains a must-visit spot 40 years after opening

Used generously as a thematic anchor in Christopher Nolan’s eyebusting summer blockbuster, The Odyssey, Zeus’s Law is a Homeric social contract adapted from xenia (ancient Greek for sacred hospitality). Strangers must be treated with absolute kindness and respect, lest they be gods in disguise.

Nolan’s film is about a weary man weathering obstacles and the Papageorgiou family must have faced their share of storms. You wouldn’t know it, however, stepping foot into their Mykonian oasis. Conceived by Elias Papageorgiou, Santa Marina hotel is a complex of white structures burrowed into a steep hillside overlooking a stretch of the Aegean so deep and so blue it almost swallows you up.

The hotel’s heritage is as solid as Mykonian rock. Elias, the former shipping magnate, could surely have found an empty plot on which to build the island’s first proper luxury hotel in 1979. Instead he bet on a rugged site dotted with a chapel, a windmill and a pigeon house that are still intact.

The hotel, which marks its 40th anniversary this year, has evolved into a luxury resort that super yachts frequently dock at. Acquired into Marriott’s Luxury Collection in 2012, Santa Marina is now managed by Elias’s daughter, Christiana, and it boasts all the facilities you’d expect: an Instagram-friendly swimming pool, a Ginkgo Spa with an encyclopedic treatments menu, a high-tech gym open all hours, a private beach (the only guarded sandy stretch on the island) and a pristine, open-door tennis court, perfect for early morning rallies. 

Rooms here are chic if restrained: clad in soft and earthy tones, fitted with rattan furniture and balconies facing those shimmering cerulean waters. Villas with more vertiginous views are also available. So too the windmill, now a two person suite.

A new four-bedroom Presidential Villa set at the highest point of the resort’s private peninsula will boast a private pool, cinema, state-of-the-art gym and sauna, and a private dining space. Unveiled next July, it promises sweeping views across five Cycladic islands.    

Dining options split between fusion cuisine, courtesy of Buddha-Bar Beach – where an expansive menu offers an Aegean twist on the pan-Asian franchise – and Elais, a parasol-shaded, white-tiled restaurant where you can watch the sun drop towards the horizon and fizzle to an indigo hue. 

To cap off our stay we are treated to a farewell feast at Elais orchestrated by Yiannis Mexis, part of an itinerary of events commemorating the hotel’s anniversary. Mexis is a culinary wunderkind whose neo-Greek restaurant (Pyro) in Borough launched last summer and swiftly set the internet on fire.

The Greek chef refines – in some cases: rethinks – traditional taverna cooking, creating plates of almost mythical beauty. His food distracts your eyes and enriches your palate, and his generous hospitality warms your heart. Like the rest of Santa Marina, Mexis seems to understand Zeus’s Law implicitly.

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