Peloponnese Part 5 – Cheronisi Beach

The night crossing over the mountain range was challenging. Around midnight we arrived at the coast of the Naupliian Gulf and decided to spend the night in a small port town. Through Park4Night we found a parking area near the harbor and the summer cinema.

The next day we were about an hour away from the new kitesurfing beach. Kostas from Trinisa told us to go to the mill, so we drove directly to the Mylo’s cafe around noon. Here we found only a small parking lot, a tavern, and a bathing beach by the ruins of the mill. A nice place for swimming but not for kiting.

That’s why we moved a bit to the north to Cheronisi Beach. The journey through the olive grove was again an experience. Narrow paths lined with branches and even less space in the alleys between the houses. But at the end, we found exactly the place we were looking for. A pebbly beach wide enough for a kit launch and other parked motorhomes.

Cheronisi Beach

The beach begins right behind the access road to the Cheronisi beach parking lot. There are a couple of umbrellas, a shower, and a dry toilet if needed. A few steps from the beach there is a tavern and several houses.

The ruins of the mill can be seen from the tavern. There are buoys in the water along the parasols from the tavern. The parking lot is large enough; in its second part, it was possible to comfortably free camp. We also met a local kiter, who could not praise the spot, or rather the entire coast, because the wind here is luxurious. If you want to kitesurf here, you have to go to the end of the beach and don’t ride behind the buoys among the swimmers.

Kitesurfing spots around Cheronisi beach

If you have a car (not a van) you can drive towards Agios Andreas, about halfway between the mill and the port there is a local hangout for kiters and surfers. But the driveways are in the middle of olive groves and you have no chance to pass with a bigger car (above 2-meter height). That’s why we couldn’t even look there, unfortunately. And towards the north, it is possible to kite from anywhere.

In any case, it is possible to stand like us directly on Cheronisi beach, blow a kite a few meters from the car, and immediately go to the water. When it really got windy, people tended to leave the beach and there were very few swimmers in the water.

If there were a lot of kiters, or tourists and swimmers, it is possible to go about 300 meters north, where there is a more than kilometer-long stony beach that leads to the town of Astros. You will see very little people here and there are no restrictions on taking off or landing your kite.

The entry into the water is only a few meters gradual and then quickly goes deep. The ideal wind direction here is S, SE, and blows side-onshore.

Wind around Astros

The wind here is really incredible. But we didn’t have much hope from the beginning. After arriving at the beach, it was very hot and stuffy, not a leaf moved. It was blowing slowly around two o’clock, but the wind was from the north. Later in the afternoon we went for a swim and noticed a kitesurfer with a foil who had probably hit the water from the official kite base. We also noticed that the wind direction had changed.

It really started to blow between 4 and 5 o’clock, but then it blew until half past eight. A strip of wavy water had formed out of nowhere on the water, and it was clearly visible how the south-easterly wind overpowered the northerly one. When this dark chunk of water reached the coast, within a few minutes the wind was already around 10 m/s.

If you went further south to the kitesurfing spot, you could see from the water that the wind was even stronger there, and the wind weakened towards the north towards the city of Astros.

Even though I was incredibly broken and tired, I didn’t hesitate to go to the water. And I even jumped (at the time) my new record of over 8 meters that day. 

After about an hour of riding, I handed the kite over to Veronica completely exhausted.

The next day the situation was repeated. Around noon, we waited for the slightest breath of air, but after five o’clock it was already blowing a decent 8-10 m/s. After the previous day and kitesurfing at Trinisa, I was already so broken and all my muscles hurt that only Veronika was on the water. Despite the twitching in my hands, I ended up not going on the water and resting. Veronika kited together for almost two hours and in the evening she was just as broken as I was.

Paliochano Beach

On the third day, the forecast said it would be blowing from the north all afternoon and into the evening, so we got in the car and drove past the town of Astros and over the hill to the next beach. Paliochano Beach was recommended to us by a local kiter that it is suitable for north wind directions. The whole beach is actually a bay with very shallow water far from the shore. With the right wind direction, kitesurfing could be good here. Unfortunately, there was little wind. We met one kite foiler here who was not able to get going even with a bigger kite.

In the parking lot, we met an interesting Swedish family in a fire truck that had been converted into a “residential home”. Of course, we had to go and have a chat and look at their car. We learned that they have been traveling since April and have just returned from Turkey and want to drive through the south of Greece and then slowly return home. Two adults, three children, and three animals, a dog and, incredibly, a pigeon and a goose were traveling in the car.

The next spot we wanted to visit was the official kitesurfing base Radical Kite Center near the town of Nafplio. The spot and the city of Nafplio are located in the very north end of the Gulf of Nafplio, and the navigation showed us about half an hour’s journey to the spot.

The road skirts the coast the whole time and we could see in the distance that around five o’clock the wind had turned again and could be as strong at Cheronisi Beach as it had been the previous two days. The waves and increasing wind indicated that it might eventually blow in Nafplio that day too, so we headed straight to the spot without any further stops. But more on that in the next article. Based on these experiences and information from a local kiter, I can really recommend Cheronisi beach and the surrounding area.

Because even though the forecast was wrong for a northerly wind and not a single forecast model was showing a nice wind, the opposite was true. The bay probably always picks up the wind and it almost always blows in the afternoon. So if you want to ride in smaller waves, on a foil or just spend a few hours on the water, you are obliged to stop here.

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Author: Karel

I simply love kitesurfing :-).