The Venetian fortress crowning Imeri Gramvousa was completed in 1584, and its garrison held the rock for more than two decades after the rest of Crete fell to the Ottomans in 1669. The island surrendered in 1692, lost through betrayal rather than siege.
From the water beneath those walls passes every balos & gramvousa luxury catamaran sailing cruise from kissamos tour that leaves the harbour.
Gramvousa is in fact two islands. Imeri, the tame one, carries the fortress, a cistern and a small chapel. Agria, the wild one, is left to gulls and wind. Behind them stretches the Gramvousa Peninsula, a limestone finger at Crete's northwest corner, uninhabited apart from goats, thyme and abandoned terraces. Balos Lagoon lies at its base — Balos Lagoon, Gramvousa Peninsula, Kissamos 734 00, Greece — where currents from three directions meet across a sandbar barely a metre deep. The rose tint in the sand is not mineral. It is the crushed shell of foraminifera, single-celled organisms that live in the shallows and bleach pale when they die.
The entire peninsula sits inside a Natura 2000 protection zone. Loggerhead turtles nest on the outer beaches. The Mediterranean monk seal, among Europe's rarest mammals, still uses the sea caves around Cape Vouxa, and cormorants breed on the northern cliffs. A conservation fee of 1 EUR per person applies at the lagoon. Land access means a rough unsurfaced track along the ridge followed by 531 steps down to the sand, which is why balos & gramvousa luxury catamaran sailing cruise from kissamos tours have carried the majority of visitors here since the 1980s.
Kissamos was once Kastelli, a Venetian castle town raised over Roman Kisamos, whose mosaic floors are still being lifted from beneath the modern street grid. The port that dispatches each balos & gramvousa luxury catamaran sailing cruise from kissamos was built for cargo and island ferries; the sailing fleet arrived long afterwards. The line these vessels follow — north past Cape Vouxa, through the strait, then south into the shallows of the lagoon — traces the route pirates used when Gramvousa served as a corsair base in the 1820s, raiding shipping under a revolutionary flag while war burned on the mainland. Kissamos catamaran day cruises and Gramvousa boat trips now run that same channel. On Cretan tongues, Μπάλος και Γραμβούσα is spoken as a single name, one place rather than two.
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