About the route
Vai is a sandy beach in the far north-east of Crete, some 24 kilometres from Sitia and about six from Palekastro, the nearest village; the approach road is good. The name derives from the Greek word vagia, meaning a palm frond. The gently shelving seabed and the transparent water make for easy bathing, and the palms create a landscape that is rare in the Mediterranean. The whole place is low-lying – the grove barely rises more than seven or eight metres above the sea. On the beach there are a taverna, umbrellas, sunbeds and water sports.
In high season the beach is often overcrowded. Those in search of quiet will find it in the less developed coves south of Vai and on the beaches to the north, by ancient Itanos and at Chochlakies. Early in the morning or late in the afternoon, once the excursion coaches have gone, Vai is at its most peaceful; from the rock at the southern end of the bay the whole grove can be taken in at a glance.
Behind the beach lies the palm grove of Vai, the largest natural stand of the Cretan date palm and at the same time the largest natural palm forest in Europe. The palm valley proper covers some 200 to 250 stremmata (about 20 to 25 hectares), a strip not quite a kilometre long and under 200 metres wide, while the protected area takes in a considerably larger tract of country. It was once far more extensive: before 1957 the palms are said to have spread over some 300 hectares, and clearance then reduced them to a mere dozen. Several thousand trees stand in the grove – the figure usually quoted is around 4,500. The palms form a coastal habitat of their own, hold the sand in place and give shelter to birds and other animals. Between them grow lentisc bushes and oleander, and a pool that fills in winter attracts migrant birds, for which Vai is an important staging post on the way to and from Africa.
A popular legend has it that Arab pirates or Phoenician seafarers once spat out date stones here, and that the grove grew from them. Scientific study has shown, however, that this is a natural stand, whose age is estimated at no less than about 2,000 years. Vai became known the world over in the 1970s through a television advertisement for a brand of chocolate, in which coconuts fall from the palms – a fiction, since the palms of Vai bear only small dates.
Nature conservation
The grove and the adjoining stretch of sea belong to the European network of protected areas, Natura 2000, and since 2015 they have also lain within the Sitia UNESCO Global Geopark; the wood itself has been officially designated an “aesthetic forest” since the 1980s and is in the care of the Greek Forestry Service. Protection extends not only to the palms but to the coastal habitats, rare plants and birds. In the 1970s hippies and wild campers, who had earlier been driven out of Matala, did the forest serious harm. Since the 1980s the state authorities and Toplou Monastery, to which the land along this stretch of coast has belonged from time immemorial, have restricted wild camping, open fires and anything else that might damage the wood; the grove was fenced and recovered. A conservation project supported by the European Commission between 1999 and 2002, in which the monastery, the Lasithi forestry directorate and the Goulandris Natural History Museum took part, helped the palms to spread again, from under 16 hectares to about 20. Spending the night on the beach is forbidden. Visitors should keep to the marked paths and pick neither fronds nor fruit.
The date palm of Theophrastus
The Cretan date palm (Phoenix theophrasti) is named after the ancient naturalist Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle often called the father of botany, who had already reported palms growing on Crete; Pliny mentions them too. It was described as a separate species only in 1967, by the Swiss botanist Werner Greuter. Unlike the cultivated date palm it usually grows with several slender stems in dense clumps, reaching as much as 15 metres in height, with stiff grey-green fronds two to three metres long; its small, fibrous fruits – yellowish-brown, oval and only about a centimetre and a half long – are scarcely edible. Apart from Vai it occurs on Crete in only a few places, such as the mouth of the river at Preveli on the south coast, Souda near Plakias and Agios Nikitas, on one or two Aegean islands – Amorgos, Anafi and Chalki – and at a handful of sites on the south-west coast of Turkey, notably on the Datça and Bodrum peninsulas. The species is classed as Near Threatened. It is precisely because of this rarity that the grove of Vai is regarded as one of the island’s most valuable natural monuments.