Corfu is one of the few Greek islands where two people can have a city week and a coast week without changing island, and deciding which of those to lead with settles almost everything else. Get that order right and the rest is easy. Get it wrong and you spend the holiday in the car.
The town is the unusual part
Most Greek islands offer couples a village, a view and a beach. Corfu offers a working Venetian town — arcaded streets, shuttered façades, a green esplanade with a fortress at either end, and cricket still played on the grass in front of the cafés, which is the most improbable inheritance the British left anywhere in the Mediterranean.
What that buys two people is an evening that does not depend on a hotel. You can eat late, walk afterwards, find a bar in a lane you did not plan on, and get back on foot. That is rare in the Greek islands at any price, and it is the strongest argument for basing yourself in the old town rather than on a bay.
The other holiday is the north-east
Across the island's shoulder, the coast facing the mainland narrows into a run of sheltered coves under steep green hills. Water there is flat almost every day, the swimming is reliable rather than weather-dependent, and the stays run to villas and small properties with terraces above the water. This is the quiet, expensive, do-nothing Corfu, and for a couple who want the week to be about a table, a swim and a boat, it is the better half of the island.
What each base costs you
| Base | What is within easy reach | What you give up |
|---|---|---|
| The old town | Evenings on foot, museums, the fortresses, boats from the port | A swim off the doorstep; the good beaches want a drive |
| North-east coast | Calm coves, terraces over the water, boat days | Nightlife of any kind; the town becomes an outing |
| West coast | Sunsets, open beaches, dramatic cliff scenery | Swell on windy days, and a long drive to the town |
The drive is the constraint
Corfu is long. The roads are narrow, winding and slow, and the map flatters them badly — driving between the far ends of the island will take most of a morning and rather more out of the afternoon. Two people who plan a different corner every day will see the island through a windscreen.
The fix is either to accept one base and go deep, or to split the week between two of them. Splitting works better here than on smaller islands precisely because the halves are so unalike: a few nights in the town for the evenings, then the north-east for the water, is the itinerary most couples wish they had booked.
Evenings, and how they differ
Old-town evenings are urban ones — a long dinner, then a wander. Coastal evenings are the opposite, and quieter than people expect: a jetty, a taverna and the lights of the mainland across the channel. Neither is better. They are simply different holidays, and a couple who assume they can have both from one base every night will end up doing a lot of night driving on unlit roads.
The part that can spoil it
Corfu also carries the resort strips that its long charter history built, and two or three of them run to a very different clientele from anything above. Nothing about them is hidden — they are known by name and easy to identify before booking — but a couple who choose a bay purely on a photograph can land in the middle of one. Read where you are booking, not just what the room looks like.
Which month to take is a separate question, and so is what a week actually costs; both have their own pages.
More on Corfu