Mamma Mia! - Unfazed by the fuss in Skopelos
Skopelos, the island where the film Mamma Mia! was shot, remains a down-to-earth place
Paul Mansfield reports

On the wall of the town hall by the harbour in Skopelos there’s a faded poster. You have to cross the road to see it, turning your back on one of the prettiest ports in the Aegean, with its tumble of white houses ringed by pine-clad hills. But the poster is a curiosity. It’s one of the few reminders on Skopelos of the time last year when Hollywood came to town.

The film of Mamma Mia!, the hit musical based on the songs of ABBA, was shot here last September. An A-list cast, including Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, was based on the island for six weeks. The film’s release this week will put Skopelos in the media spotlight and perhaps give a boost to the island’s tourist industry. But on Skopelos itself, life carries on as normal.

It has always been a down-to-earth place. Most of the island’s income derives from agriculture, and it doesn’t fall over itself to attract tourists. When I first came here, a café owner with a thriving business on the seafront told me he was grateful for the short tourist season. “Just when we’re getting bored of them, they all go home.” That was eight years ago, and little has changed.

This is partly due to location. Skopelos has no airport, and getting there requires a flight to neighbouring Skiathos and an hour-long ferry journey. The ferry rolls around the entrance to Skopelos town, past the limestone cliffs that give the island its name (“the rock”), and into an almost circular harbour.

Up on high is a ruined Venetian castle, and leading down from it a ridge of stone, crowned by four brilliant white churches, along whose flank the old town lies huddled. Skopelos has almost 300 churches and chapels. They were built, it is said, by grateful islanders who resettled here in the 1600s after the entire island population had been slaughtered by Barbarossa, the Turkish admiral-pirate. Their piety paid off: Skopelos has prospered ever since.

It is a compact, hilly island whose trademark is its deep-green interior. As always on a Greek island, this, and not the sun- and wind-blasted coast, is the place to stay. Our base was Villa Rania, a traditional island house tucked away in an olive grove a mile or so out of town, with lovely views back to sea. There were stone floors and timeworn furniture in the cool interior; and outside a shady terrace surrounded by pine, olive and fig trees. Cicadas whirred, donkeys coughed, and down in the village dogs barked and cocks crowed. From the terrace, with its stone walls and small swimming pool, we watched the comings and goings in the harbour.

Skopelos town remains defiantly Greek in flavour. In the slightly scrappy outskirts, cars and motorcycles trundle in all directions while pedestrians and dogs wander anarchically across the dusty streets.

On the harbour front there are a few large modern cafés, but just as many places that haven’t changed in years, including one ancient cafeneion whose walls are hung with black-and-white photographs of dashing young island men in the 1940s and ‘50s. Many of them are now evidently sitting outside with walking sticks, walrus moustaches and komboloi worry beads.

The front is pedestrianised at evening, and fills up for the volta, or evening stroll. Families walk at the water’s edge; young couples trot by in horse-drawn traps; wide-eyed children take pony rides. The fairy lights strung above the harbour give the scene an old-fashioned innocence. There are some souvenir shops and tourist restaurants, but in the main Skopelos is run for the benefit of its own inhabitants.

The film adaptation of Mamma Mia! stars Meryl Streep

Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth also feature in Mamma Mia!

Skopelos has almost 300 churches and chapels Photo: Getty

There's no airport, so tourism has never really taken off - much to the satisfaction of many locals Photo: Getty

Skopelos town remains defiantly Greek in flavour Photo: Getty

Perhaps that’s why they’re so low-key about Mamma Mia! According to one local, the town was “buzzing” during filming, with several islanders co-opted as extras. Brosnan, Firth, Julie Walters and others rented villas and were often seen out and about.

Meryl Streep — always accompanied by two minders — ventured out rarely, preferring to hide away in the Skopelos Village complex just outside town. It was, said Brosnan, “one of the most laid-back shoots I’ve done”. When the cast and crew moved on to Skiathos and the Pelion, Skopelos went back to its untroubled rhythm. Talk of a new “Mamma Mia! cocktail bar” has proved premature.

Kastani, the tiny west coast bay that was the film’s main location site, is worth a look. The producers built a beach bar and jetty (Mamma Mia!’s plot has Streep as an expatriate taverna owner visited by three former suitors), but removed them when they left. Swimming offshore, you look back on a bay so symmetrical it might be an amphitheatre, and so extravagantly green that it might have been painted by a set hand.

Skopelos is full of such bays. Cross the island to the west coast — a journey that takes you past ancient monasteries and through lush plum, pear and almond orchards — and you stumble across bay after bay with the same clear water, where steep pine-clad slopes rise all around and half a dozen bathers constitute a crowd. Even Skopelos’s two small resorts, Stafilos and Panormos, are quiet, clean and well-managed places.

At the north of the island lies Glossa, its second town. Here old-style island houses with wooden balconies and outside lavatories cling to the steep hillside. Donkeys laden with fruit and hay clump through the steep and narrow streets; there are one or two places to eat and stay, but otherwise Glossa is entirely agricultural, firmly stuck in the past and proud of it. The view from the top of the town — back across Skiathos, with the island of Evia shimmering in a heat haze — is reminiscent of that of Santorini.

The east coast is quieter still. Skirting another Mamma Mia! location — a headland with a private villa whose owners apparently refused to budge during filming, requiring scenes to be rearranged around their property, a piece of resistance so essentially Skopelot it makes you want to cheer — the road drops into a wide valley carpeted by olives and fringed by a shingle beach. The water is a deep, flinty blue; gulls nest on the rocks; and out in the distance ferries glide towards the harbour. This is Glysteri beach, a favourite of locals but strangely overlooked by tourists.

Glysteri is managed by the delightful Kosmas family, who run the Palio Karnayio (“Old Boatyard”) taverna, a sprawling place with blue-checked tables set under tamarisk trees, a couple of boats up on blocks and, inside, a sort of home-made museum, with a collection of old family photographs, pottery and farming implements. Seafood is fresh off the boat moored at the small jetty; sunloungers are spread out on the beach, and the beach and bay cleaned daily by one of the Kosmas sons.

Food is country cooking: grilled mullet, stifado stew, Skopelot tiropita – circular cheese pie. The wine — retsina or dry white — is ice-cold. Hours can pass by at this blissful place, with no sound but the lapping of the waves. Since Mamma Mia! had been filmed on the headland above, I asked if Meryl Streep had perhaps dropped by for an ouzo, but apparently not. Poor thing: she didn’t know what she was missing.

Telegraph, Tuesday, July 15, 2008