Holiday Corfu Villas

Antinioti Lagoon Corfu

A protected wetland area so diverse and unique that offers the amazing experience of an open-air natural history museum combined with peaceful woodland hikes and rugged shoreline pathways.

Corfu nature at its best

If you are up for a different kind of experience, just at a stone’s throw from our Luxury villas in Corfu, then Antinioti Lagoon is definitely a place worth visiting. Wear your sport shoes or take your bike, cross a small wooden bridge at the far end of St. Spyridon beach and find yourselves to a completely diverse setting!

Antinioti Lagoon covers 400.000 square meters across an area of 1 million square meters of forest, marshes and reed beds. It is one of the few protected wetland areas under Natura 2000 in the Ionian Islands, listed on the European Environment Agency website. The wetland area is generally known as Nissos Island and it is abundant with wildlife species. This is where you can catch a glimpse of the threatened otter species called Lutra Lutra, the agile frog or watch wild birds, either endemic or migrant, fly over the lagoon. Moreover, amateur botanists will be impressed at the species of rare orchids and other wild flora encountered across the ecosystem.

Τhe mesmerizing landscape of the lagoon and the nearby sand dunes was described by the famous British author Gerald Durrell in his autobiography My Family and Other Animals as the “Lake of Lillies”: “it was a mile long, an elongated sheet of shallow water surrounded by a thick mane of cane and reed, and separated from the sea at one end by a wide, gently curving dune of white sand… It was the only place on the island where those sand lilies grew, strange misshapen bulbs buried in the sand, that once a year sent up thick green leaves and white flowers above the surface, so that the dune became a glacier of flowers.”

Want more?

Apart from the wildlife and the lagoon, visitors will surely appreciate a nice dive into the cool waters of Nissos beach after their hike around the wetland. A peaceful secluded sandy beach, way off the beaten track that offers no more than the exotic setting of the turquoise Ionian Sea waters, the rugged shoreline and the melodic singing of the cicadas. Whatever you feel like doing, be it a hike to explore nature, a picnic in the forest or the view of the sun sinking in the horizon, this place offers the complete experience!