There are certain places that exude an inexplicable aura – they are so uncannily attractive that no amount of reason can explain the attraction.

Corfu’s Myrtiotissa Beach near the village of Vatos on that Ionian island’s west coast is one such place for me. I have been going to this short, isolated stretch of sandy seashore – so unusual for Corfu – since I have been visiting Greece. For more than a quarter century now, wherever I am, be it New York or Bordeaux, when early spring’s first warming breezes hint at a lift in winter’s cold pallor, I start dreaming of Myrtiotissa and its surrounds under towering St. George’s Mountain in Corfu’s agrarian midwest.

I always ask myself – why it is that I want to leave whatever I’m doing and go to this isolated corner of Corfu. I know this island has been providing succor for weary travelers since Odysseus –one of recorded history’s first lost voyageurs - washed up on Ermones Beach not far from Myrtiotissa. But how did the beach and the area put me under their spell?

Many possible explanations run through my head as I leave the KTEL bus midroute to trendy Glyfada Beach at the unmarked crossroads across from a large, gnarled olive tree. The nearby village is called Vatos, but, in reality, it is the hamlet of Kelia hidden high in the seemingly unending grove of green olive trees carpeting St. George’s southern slopes. Kelia was incorporated into the Vatos Municipality several decades ago.

In my first years, I would drop off an old, green country bus that made as much noise as speed further up the road from the Kelia turnoff at another crossroads marked with a small iron sign written in Greek only pointing to the Myrtiotissa Monastery presumably to be found somewhere down the well trodden trail starting there where the cranky bus left me.

I knew the beach was nearby because someone in the archetypal Greek hippy island of Ios had told me it was there. Myrtiotissa had garnered acclaim as being an isolated, sandy three hundred meters long beach with a fresh water spring tumbling from a crevice in the striking rock face behind it. I like to dream that Poseidon aimlessly tossed the huge boulders strewn about the beach though I know that winter winds and waves often wreak havoc on the island’s much-exposed west coast.

Originally Myrtiotissa, meaning myrtle, was the site of an extremely isolated Byzantine Monastery established by a Christianized Turkish monk in the 14th Century. It was built into the rock on Corfu’s inhospitable coast in the forest not far, but hidden, from the beach. The monastery’s name - Saint Myrtiotissa - derives from an icon of the Virgin miraculously found among the myrtles.

Miraculous was also the word to describe the trail – actually a donkey path – used by monks to leave their monastery. In my first years there, the precipitous trail was the only way down to the beach. I can not relate my surprise when I returned one year and saw that the trail – at least until the steep descent to the beach stopped the bulldozer – was widened into an extremely rocky tract good enough for 4WD vehicles and motorbikes. Though I’ve made my peace with the widened tract, in moments of weakness, memories of an idyllic walk through the trees down to the mesmerizing beach still wash over me. At those times, I stop and ponder what progress and tourism have meant to Myrtiotissa and Corfu. It is still easy to see why the English ex-patriot writer Lawrence Durrell in his seminal Prospero’s Cell called it “the loveliest beach in Europe”, but I would appreciate it more without the high season throngs mobbing it.

During the summer months of July and August, Corfu’s small airport – still located near the city center – is made even more woefully inadequate by the charter flights disgorging hordes of pale, squinting Northern Europeans, then embarking the same number of brown and burnt homebound tourists. Though the island’s west coast hasn’t suffered as much as the more sheltered eastern beaches like Ipsos and Benitsis, the effects are as insidious. Viticulture and agriculture, especially oleoculture (olive culture) have suffered a lack of labor, especially for pruning and harvest.

Mass tourism has meant an exodus of young people from the countryside, leaving their traditional pursuits, for bright lights and enticing city sights. Corfu’s Venetian overlords so prized the climate and soil of their Ionian Island jewel that beginning in 1565 when they took control of the island, administrative fees and fines were paid by the plantation of olive trees. Today, it is said that almost two percent of the world’s olive oil is produced by Corfu’s three million trees (which cover one-third of the island) – but, very little is packaged and sold to the many summer visitors who vacation on the island. Why? Because Corfu’s oil is deemed so valuable to prestigious Tuscan producers as a fine blending element that Italians regularly purchase the island’s entire production at very good prices and send it to Italy by tanker ship. I believe this is to the detriment of local producers even though they are reluctant to bottle it.

Reveling in memories of times past can only do so much for me. Strolling along one of the many trails that link the disparate areas around Myrtiotissa helps me relax and calm down from the preceding year’s activities. As I walk along the shaded and fragrant trails I like observing changes in a familiar landscape. I marvel at meters tall olive trees whose girth and height testify to their age. I know many of the local owners and can tell when they have stayed in Germany by how unkempt the land beneath their trees is. I was most surprised two years ago when I came across one of my most beloved terraces and saw it had been severely pruned. I used to stretch out under the old trees to relax in the serene thyme, oregano and basil scented earth. I realized that the pruning had to be done to make serious olive cultivation feasible. Nevertheless I was taken aback when the once seductively shady area under the stately olives was awash with bright sunlight.

Authentic country Greek cooking is one of the main reasons I continue to call at the taverna known throughout the world as Spiros 97. When tourism, even if it was of the sporadic, live-off-the-land hippy type, came to Kelia in the late 1970s, Spyros Moulinou – the patriarch – started preparing meals for the peripatetic travelers. At first it was a simple fare, often just a few portions more than what was needed to feed his family. But when travelers started bringing their friends to Spiros’ tiny mountainside shop, the wily trader saw the signs and called his daughter Irene back from her nascent career as a coiffeuse in Pireaus to second her mother Maria in the kitchen. The rest, as they say, is history. The tiny shop gained a small terrace, then a second, before being totally renovated. An airy rooftop terrace crowned the new shop allowing fine views over the valley below. The Moulinou also renovated their traditional olive press shed and donkey stables up the hill behind the shop/taverna and started renting simple rooms to the hippies who, heretofore, had colonized nearby olive groves with their tents and impromptu camps to the total consternation of amazed local peasants. The hearty food, by the way, is still delectable.

Often, as I leave the beach, sweating profusely on the steep walk up the cliff, I reflect on my decision to come to Myrtiotissa and Vatos. The absence of tower block hotels, the endless olive terraces, the warmth of the locals all add to an experience that is authentic and that entices me to return every year. And that surprisingly hasn’t changed all that much in 25 years.

My affection for the region goes beyond the idyllic beach. Kelia’s peacefulness, the warmth of the Moulinou clan that keeps the simple taverna with its fine homecooking and basic rooms, the narrow, worn trail that winds its way from Kelia through terraces of gnarled, half-millennia old olive trees where I always expect hobbits and other assorted gnomes to pop up from behind them, the first view of enticing blue seas that appears just before descending the impossibly steep dirt track to the sea then the beach itself – all these images are indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye. I just can’t stay away from the place.

For information on rooms at Spiros 97 and in Vatos contact: Despina Moulinou on: tel: +302661094309 or fax: +302661094044

Olives – The Life & Lore of a Noble Fruit by Mort Rosenblum (Absolute Press – 1997, 320 pages. ISBN: 1 899791 38 8) is a lively book that offers well researched insight on olives, olive oil and oleoculture that should put the Corfu and Vatos groves into a much broader perspective.

For those interested in an authentic Corfu experience: The Corfu Trail, PO Box 40, GR-49100 Corfu, Greece (www.corfutrail.org) is composed in part by trails on St. George’s Mountain in the Vatos and Myrtiotissa areas.