For decades this stretch of the Peloponnese was known mostly to people who already had houses there. It now has two global hotel brands, an Irish packaging financier and close to €2 billion of planned investment.
Porto Heli left almost no impression. A small waterfront, a few tavernas, not much else that fixed itself in memory. Beyond the town the road emptied quickly. The houses were mostly along the coast around Agios Emilianos, set well back behind walls and hedges, and their scale was easier to judge from the water: long plots running towards the sea, roofs appearing briefly through the trees.
I first went in July 2012. Evenings usually ended on Spetses, with dinner at Patralis, later Guzel, and then the boat back to the mainland. My clearest memory of Porto Heli is the return after dark: the empty road, the gates and the long drive beyond them.
Greek families had been coming to this part of the Peloponnese for decades, often to the same house every summer. Others came because somebody they knew was already there. The place had a reputation, but it travelled by word of mouth, and nobody had yet thought to call it a Riviera.
Amanzoe opened the following month, at the height of the Greek debt crisis. Ed Tuttle placed it high above the countryside, with colonnades, reflecting pools and the sea beyond. The resort made the place easier to find.
Occasionally one of the houses behind the walls enters the public record. In February 2018 the summer estate of the former newspaper publisher Stavros Psycharis was auctioned at a notary’s office in Kranidi, at the instigation of Alpha Bank. On paper the debtor was a Cypriot company; the house was his. Bidders had to lodge a €1.5 million guarantee before they could take part. The estate covered 26,000 square metres and included a 100-square-metre pool. Bidding opened at €4.7 million and closed at €11.75 million. The Greek press reported that the buyer was probably a shipowner, acting through an offshore company.
For an afternoon, at least, the arithmetic was visible.
Six months later Amanzoe itself changed hands. Grivalia Hospitality and the resort’s developer paid its listed owner €5.8 million for the whole thing, and took on about €110 million of liabilities.
Estate agents now call the area the Greek Riviera. Rivieras have promenades. Porto Heli had a supermarket and a private airfield.
The airfield began with Tasos Alexiou, a businessman and pilot who bought land here in 1960, reportedly from shepherds. By the end of the decade he had built what Greek reports describe as the country’s first private airfield, beside the sea south of the town. “Airport” grants too much grandeur to a 678-metre concrete runway with water inconveniently close to either end. A later environmental study says Alexiou used it himself and for friends, including Aristotle Onassis and Bill Lear, founder of Learjet.
Olympic Airways flew in during the 1960s and kept coming into the 1970s, and Alexiou let the national carrier use his runway without charge. Under the junta he tried to enlarge it and failed; the plan was abandoned in 1974. One photograph from those years shows an Olympic Piper Aztec that has run off the end of the runway, with the Alexiou children and the family Mercedes nearby. Nobody appears to have found any of this especially remarkable.
Commercial flights eventually stopped, though private aircraft continued. The civil aviation authority closed the field in 2004 over maintenance problems, and when its certificate expired in 2008 nobody renewed it. Alexiou died in January 2011. The runway, hangar and control tower stayed where they were.
In 2022 the former king, Constantine, sold his villa in Porto Heli to a Bulgarian businessman. A few months later the company that owned the Alexiou estate, some 30 hectares with the runway on it, went to Paul Coulson for a sum reported at about €50 million. Greek coverage called it the most expensive plot of land ever sold in the country.
Coulson is the Irish financier who took control of the Irish Glass Bottle Company at Ringsend and, over 25 years of debt-financed acquisitions, turned it into Ardagh, a glass and metal packaging group with more than $9 billion in annual sales. He already spent his summers here. In February 2023 a separate deal brought the AKS Porto Heli and AKS Hinitsa Bay hotels, 214 and 220 rooms, from the Siakola family under Coulson control, for another sum reported at roughly €50 million. In Porto Heli, the figure has a way of recurring. The Greek financial press settled on calling him the Irish Croesus.
In December 2024 Four Seasons announced it would operate a resort at Hinitsa Bay with Hinitsa Bay Holdings, the company controlled by the Coulson family. The estate runs to 75 hectares with 3.25 kilometres of coastline, and the plans call for 80 rooms and suites, 30 bungalows and a set of branded villas. Greek reporting puts the investment above €250 million, supported in part by a €64.4 million bond loan involving Attica Bank and Greece’s Recovery and Resilience Fund. The paperwork was less discreet than the houses.
The municipality has since given preliminary approval for demolition on the old airfield. Between 20 and 30 residences are planned there and on the site of the Alexiou house, and environmental documents envisage some coastal houses of between 800 and 1,500 square metres. The runway is to be removed. Anyone wanting to arrive directly by air will have to make do with a helicopter.
The same documents discuss improving the “qualitative characteristics” of visitors by attracting people with higher incomes. Social aspiration is rarely stated with the efficiency of a planning submission. The intended visual effect, meanwhile, is an “unbuilt natural landscape.”
Down the coast, on the site of the abandoned Costa Perla hotel, Six Senses was due to open in 2026. The date moved to 2027, then to 2028, and the main construction contract was signed only this July. The resort will have around 60 rooms and suites, a three-bedroom retreat villa and 12 branded residences of five to eight bedrooms, reportedly priced above €8 million each. Its spa will contain a Biohacking Lounge, and elsewhere on the property there will be a traditional Greek kafeneio. None of this is especially simple, though simplicity is part of what is being sold. Across the wider area, the Greek press this spring counted close to €2 billion of hotels, villas, marinas and sports facilities planned or under way.
While the drawings for Hinitsa were being prepared, Ardagh was negotiating with its creditors. In the summer of 2025 Coulson agreed to hand the group to bondholders owed about $4.2 billion. The old shareholders were paid $300 million, of which Coulson’s share was about $108 million. Dissident creditors who objected to the payout went to court, and the case was resolved only this June. The new owners are now selling Ardagh in parts. In Porto Heli, the hotels and the airfield remain with his family’s company.
Next to the Hinitsa Bay hotel, on the beach, is a taverna that has served lunch on the same spot since 1955. Locals call it the grandmother’s taverna. In 2023 Greek reports citing local property sources said Coulson had offered its owner as much as €20 million and been turned down, for reasons the same sources described as sentimental. Coulson’s representatives later played down the account, though negotiations were reportedly held.
For now, lunch stays put.