Most guides to Lefkada are really guides to the north of it — Lefkada Town, Nidri, the west-coast beaches, the same six photographs. The south is a different island: emptier, greener, folded into bays, and close enough to the water that everything you do here begins at sea level. We live on this coast, and this is the south as we'd actually spend it.
Take a boat out of the south, not out of Nidri
Nearly every boat trip advertised on Lefkada leaves from Nidri, at the top of the channel, and spends its first hour getting to where you already are. From Sivota — and from the bay below us — you start where the good water starts.
You can hire a small boat without a licence, as long as the engine is under the legal power limit, which covers most of what is on the quay. That is the whole trick to this coast: a modest boat, a cool box, and a day with no plan.
Within an easy run you have the whole southern archipelago — Meganisi across the channel with its coves and its blue caves, and the low green shapes of Kalamos, Kastos, Arkoudi and Atokos further out, most of them with a taverna on a quay and almost nothing else. Go mid-morning while the channel is still glass.
The bays you can only reach from the water
The south-east coastline is broken into small coves, and the best of them have no road. Along the shoreline of Mikros Gialos alone there are several — a few metres of pebble between two shoulders of rock — plus a sea cave, all of it reachable by swimming or on a paddleboard, and empty most mornings.
You can hire a kayak, a SUP or a pedalo at the bay, and there are guided sea-kayak trips through the season if you'd rather be shown the coast than find it. It is the single best half-day here, and it costs almost nothing. More on the bay in our guide to Mikros Gialos.
Lunch in the fjord at Sivota
Sivota is not a beach. It is a narrow green-walled inlet, almost a fjord, where the yachts moor stern-to in front of a line of fish tavernas — and it is the best lunch on this side of the island. You swim off the rocks at the mouth of the bay, then sit down to whatever came in that morning.
Arrive by 12.30, not 2pm. The sailing flotillas drop anchor in the early afternoon and the waterfront fills in twenty minutes. The family-run places at the far end of the quay, away from the road, will usually keep a shaded corner by the water if you simply ask.
Vasiliki: where the wind actually is
The south's other harbour is one of the best-known windsurfing bays in the Mediterranean, and for a reason worth understanding even if you never touch a board. A thermal wind fills the bay from around midday — reliably enough that the mornings are calm and beginner-friendly and the afternoons belong to the sails.
That same wind is why our coast is the way it is. Vasiliki and the west coast get it; the bays east of the ridge do not. If a day is too blowy to swim on the west side, it is usually flat calm at home. Schools on the bay rent kit by the hour, and it is a good lunch stop regardless — the colours crossing the water are the show.
Vasiliki is also where the ferries leave for Kefalonia and Ithaca, which makes a day on another island genuinely easy from down here.
Go up, not along
The instinct on a Greek island is to drive the coast. In the south, drive uphill instead. The villages behind this coastline — Poros, Vournikas, Marantochori, Fterno, Neochori — sit in olive terraces a few hundred metres above the sea, and they are ordinary in the best sense: a square, a church, a kafeneio, and nobody selling you anything.
Poros is the one we know best, because we live above it. It has an ancient tower on the hill over it and it cannot see the sea at all — both of which turn out to be the same story. We wrote it up separately in our guide to Poros village.
The reward for going up is the view. From the ridge you get the whole strait at once: Meganisi, Kalamos and Kastos, Ithaca and the top of Kefalonia, and the mainland mountains beyond. Take a coffee up there in the evening.
The west coast — one day, done properly
Porto Katsiki, Egremni and Kathisma are genuinely spectacular and you should see them once. Be honest about what they are: dramatic, exposed, often windy, with big surf and almost no natural shade — and, from the south, an hour's drive over the mountain via Athani rather than the coast road everybody else takes.
So treat it as a single planned outing. Go early while the sea is calm and the light is soft, take water and a sun umbrella, and be back on the sheltered side for the evening swim. Our beach guide covers how to choose between them.
Eat where the menu is short
The south rewards anyone willing to leave the main strip. Sivota for fish at the water's edge. The tavernas at Mikros Gialos for the unfussy version — grilled fish, a Greek salad, a carafe of cold white, five minutes from either of our houses. The village kafeneia inland for a coffee that turns into two hours.
A rule that rarely fails here: eat where the menu is short, the fish is whatever came in that morning, and the family is doing the cooking.
And then, the blue hour
The island is named, in our minds at least, for that last soft hour before dark. The west coast gets the famous fireball sunsets. Our favourite version is quieter: back on the sheltered side, a swim as the light goes gold and then violet over the Ionian, the lights of the fishing boats coming on one by one across the strait. You don't have to drive anywhere for it. It arrives.
Stay in the south
Everything above is within half an hour of both our houses. Cavos Villa stands above the bay at Mikros Gialos, five minutes' walk from the water and close to the boats at Sivota; Villa Anatoli, Poros sits higher, on the mountain, for the view across the strait.