Corfu for couples

On Corfu, 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 one holiday

Corfu offers couples a working Venetian town — arcaded streets, shuttered façades, a green esplanade facing a fortress, and cricket still played on the grass in front of the cafés, which is an improbable inheritance the British left behind.

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 a strong 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 it suits a couple who want the week to be about a table, a swim and a boat.

What each base costs you

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 here precisely because the halves are so unalike: a few nights in the town for the evenings, then the north-east for the water.

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.