Travel Guide Spinalonga

The peninsula, which stretches from north to south in front of Plaka and Elounda, is separated from the coast by the Poros Channel. It is the French occupation troops who dug the latter at the end of the 19th century. In front of Plaka, a powerful and superb Venetian fortress, built in 1579, protects the access to the gulf. In spite of immense efforts, the Turks never managed to occupy it, and it is only by treaty that the fortress fell under the domination of the Ottoman Empire in 1715, that is to say fifty years after the rest of Crete. The island of Spinalonga became Cretan again in 1903 (by a curious twist of history, some Turkish families found refuge there for fear of reprisals from the Christians...), and after the island became part of Greece and until 1957, it became a leper colony with particularly lamentable human and sanitary conditions.Despite the difficult living conditions, the lepers of Spinalonga developed an incredible resistance. All of them gradually tried to give life back to the island despite their isolation. Thus, they exploited the irrigation systems put in place by the Venetians, cultivated the land, planted orchards, built taverns... Historians have also revealed the birth of about twenty children on Spinalonga and even some marriages. In the 1930s, electricity was brought to the island and a new hospital was built. It was not until 1957 that the leprosarium closed its doors.Today, it can be visited. In the island's cemetery, occupied exclusively by lepers, you will see that these unfortunate people were entitled to different treatments: those who received a government pension have a stele, those who had their burial paid for by the family are buried directly in the ground, and those who had no income rest in the common grave.