Sidari

History

Sidari sits on the site of a prehistoric settlement excavated in the 1960s by archaeologist Augustinos Sordinas, whose finds at the Canal d'Amour cliffs revealed one of the few stratified sequences in Greece running from the Mesolithic through the early Neolithic, with domestic cereals, fauna, and mudbrick houses; the site was later buried under river alluvium. Until the late 1980s the beach itself was largely undeveloped and administratively tied to the inland village of Avliotes, with Sidari forming from two smaller settlements linked by the long beach that gradually merged as building infill continued. Tourism arrived modestly in the 1960s-70s, drawn by the wind- and wave-eroded sandstone coves now known as the Canal d'Amour, whose French name and local legend -- that couples who swim its length stay together, or find true love on the far side -- have made it Sidari's best-known landmark; larger-scale hotel and restaurant development followed from the 1990s. The village's population grew from 218 in 1981 to 506 at the 2021 census.

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