Navagio is a slot of white pebbles under 200-metre cliffs on the northwest coast of Zakynthos, open only to the sea, with a rusted freighter lying on the sand since 1980. The ship was the Panagiotis, a small coaster said to have been running cigarettes when the coastguard chased it into a storm and the storm put it here. The crew walked away; the ship did not. The cove had been Agios Georgios until then, and it has been Navagio — shipwreck — ever since. What made it the most photographed beach in Greece is the colour, and that comes off the cliffs: white limestone, with the water glowing against it. It is at its most electric within an hour of noon, when the sun drops straight into the slot between the walls and the shadow is off the sand.
You cannot stand on that sand. The same white limestone is loose, undercut by the sea and overhanging in places, and after rock came down on visitors below the cove was closed to landing. So what you get is an approach that stops short. Small boats run out of Porto Vromi and the Volimes coast, roughly June to September and only when the sea is calm, and nose in to about forty metres from the sand, which is as close as you get. From there the wreck sits rust-brown against the white wall, two hundred metres of cliff going up behind it. The first boat of the day beats the flotilla that fills the bay by mid-morning, though the colour is best nearer noon. From land there is one way in: the paved road through Volimes, which ends at a railed platform on the very edge, the white crescent far below you. For years that rim was a favourite with BASE jumpers, who stepped off into two hundred metres of air and opened their canopies over the sand. The overhang that gave them the drop is the one shedding rock onto the beach now.