Acro Suites

To my embarrassment, if you had told me there were snow-capped mountains on Crete, I wouldn’t have believed you. Having never visited, I assumed the island was much like any of the Greek outcrops that cluster proudly in the Mediterranean Sea: craggy, windswept, sun-soaked and speckled with secret beaches and shimmering hilltop towns. It has all of those things in abundance, of course, but it also has Mount Ida, white-crested and looming 2,456 metres above sea level, lining the horizon inland from Heraklion. 

Mrs Smith and I landed into the Cretan capital at around lunchtime on a Monday in late April, in search of an escape from the clutches of the UK weather, and a few days of bittersweet R&R before the imminent birth of our first child. The pressure was on, essentially. 

First, we put Ida at our back and drove down to Ierapetra on the south-eastern tip of the island, stopping at a hastily Googled taverna near the highway for our first meal in Crete. Last year, we spent a week on Tinos, my first visit to a Greek island, and fell instantly in love. And as soon as the tzatziki landed on the table, it all came flooding back. The breeze in the olive groves, the souvlaki, the chill of a Mythos beer; the sense of being somewhere ancient and storied and convivial in a way that the UK could never even dream of. Time slows down on a Greek island, and the responsibilities of the real world seem to melt into memory. 

On our way to Acro Suites, we spent a few days first in Ierapetra, where the beaches are darkly volcanic and dotted with olive-green serpentinite rocks, and the rain was, at times, comically torrential. The weather app promised the clouds would lift for our final stop, a luxurious clifftop hotel on a peninsula just west of Heraklion. As we made our way north, they did just that. By the time we crested the hill behind the hotel, the sun was beating down once again, and the sheer audacity of Acro Suite’s Brutalist architecture was written across the horizon.

This hotel is not so much built atop, but carved out of the cliffs high above the sea below. Each of the 49 rooms has its own infinity pool, and some are so deep into the rock that they are basically grottos. There are four restaurants, two gyms, a tennis court and a spa, but once in the room, you feel like you’re all alone. The hotel was full, we were told, but once we shut the door, we felt like the last people on Earth (with access to room service). 

On our first night, we feasted on slow-cooked lamb and Aegean sea-bream at Cremnos, the hotel’s main dining space, washing it down with glasses of crisp, herbaceous vidiano, produced just a few miles away at the Efrosini Winery. After a couple of admittedly sub-par days in the Cretan rain, the food, the room, the warmth of the staff and the endless glittering sea below had us feeling like all was right in the world. 

Acro Suites is a hotel for people that like to move. On our first morning, I headed for one of the gyms, a triple-height, light-filled space that puts most hotel gyms to shame. For those that dabble, you’ll know how hard it is to find ‘free weights’ at even the most well-appointed establishments, so I was shocked at how good this gym is. There’s even a separate space dedicated to reformer Pilates, which is lost on me, admittedly, but an absolute delight for the Pilates-loving Mrs Smith. 

You could spend days, weeks even, just whiling away the hours in your own private idyll at Acro Suites, but on our last afternoon we went for a wander along the cliffs toward Agia Pelagia, a charming little town lining a wide sandy bay. Before doubling back, we settled in for a couple of beers and a game of Yahtzee at the bar on Paralia Mononaftis, an impossibly charming beach in a cove just a few hundred yards from the hotel. I can’t think of a more perfect place to spend those last bittersweet hours of a holiday. 

That night, we had dinner at Oceano, a Sicilian-Greek fusion restaurant on the cliffs, and watched the sun set from a table on the terrace. Everything on the menu looked good, and I wanted to try it all, so I was thrilled when the chef offered to bring us a little bit of each dish. (There were only five main courses, so it wasn’t as insane as it sounds.) The squid tagliatelle was a highlight, but I would swim back to Crete for another plate of the bottarga-enhanced cacio e pepe. 

By lunchtime the next day, we were already in the air, waving goodbye to Mount Ida, and weeping gently into our airport sandwiches. Despite an inauspicious couple of days, the Last Holiday of Freedom had been a resounding success, and Mrs Smith and I headed home relaxed, refreshed and marginally more ready for the arrival of our baby. When I’m knee-deep in nappies, I will think of my happy place: on the terrace of our room at Acro Suites, with a club sandwich on order.