If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR251.20), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
In the ancient fir forests of Arcadia, Manna has been sent not from heaven, but from a Greek aristocrat and a Swiss architect with an eye for life’s simple pleasures. The philanthropic patrician saw the healing potential of the altitude and woodland of this earthly paradise, and set about making a retreat for wounded soldiers. In homage to its other famous visitor Dionysus, it’s not all pure health today – there’s a wine cellar and gourmet Greek restaurant ensuring pleasurable impromptus. Nearby, Pan’s playground somehow gets even better with ancient monasteries, especially clean rivers and cobblestone villages in the mountains.
Smith Extra
Get this when you book through us:
A bottle of wine, plus a platter of fruit and sweet treats
Double rooms from £215.12 (€251). Please note the hotel charges an additional government tax of €10.00 per room per night on check-out.
More details
Rates usually include breakfast.
Also
Some of the rooms at Manna have been adapted for guests with mobility issues.
At the hotel
Free WiFi throughout, bicycles to borrow, gym, and yoga space in the forest. In rooms: air-conditioning, espresso machine, minibar with cocktail-making kit, heated floors, smart TV, and free bottled water.
Our favourite rooms
All of the rooms have a view to speak of, since it would be rude not to with this landscape. If you prefer your bath tubs to be copper, book the Manna Suite. Each room has outdoor space, too, so mix up the cocktail from the kit in your minibar, sit back and enjoy the particularly verdant view.
Poolside
There’s a pool in a cave that can be booked for exclusive use from 7pm.
Spa
The Manna Wellness Hub has a deck for yoga and stargazing, sauna, hammam, lily pond and cave pool, plus two rooms for stellar treatments (see: the two-hour Ursa Major ritual) and warm and cold stone massages.
Packing tips
Feel free to bring your own lyre (just don’t go challenging Apollo to a play off).
Also
The hotel’s array of artworks includes pieces by the Greek painter Nikos Kanoglou and lighting design by Eleftheria Deko, whose luminary skills were most recently used to grace the Acropolis.
Many of the materials used in the hotel’s construction were locally sourced, geothermal energy is used for heating and cooling, and there’s a tank to collect rainwater. There’s also a charging point for electric cars, chemical-free cleaning products and refillable amenities, and lots of the ingredients are grown in nearby smallholdings and organic farms.
Warming up by the fireplace in winter, or out on the terrace by the lily pond – either way, you’ll be worshipping at the rather attractive altar of Mother Nature.
Dress Code
Ready to party with Dionysus (but draw the line at a full-blown bacchanalia).
Hotel restaurant
Eat all the ambrosia you can manage at Manna and you’ll have eternal youth and beauty, and a sated appetite. The acclaimed Greek chef Athinagoras Kostakos has added his expertise to this mountain retreat, which serves authentic but modernised local dishes (with seasonality and zero waste both high priorities) amid a bucolic backdrop that will make you feel as good as the food does. A buffet breakfast of local produce from small suppliers (with supplementary made-to-order dishes) is served both inside and outdoors, with coffees roasted especially for Manna at a neighbouring artisanal roastery.
Hotel bar
You’d expect nothing less from where Dionysus used to hang out, but the hotel has a well-stocked wine cellar. The bar also has an impressive selection of malt whiskies and spirits, some international, others sourced from nearby artisans – all of which can be enjoyed with a view of the lush landscape. Cocktails are made even better with herbs picked in the Menalon highlands and locally made fir honey.
Last orders
The restaurant opens for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The bar calls time at midnight.
Manna is in Arcadia in mainland Greece’s central-eastern Peloponnese region, east of Athens and Corinth, and north of the famously finger-shaped peninsulas.
Planes
The closest airport is Kalamata, an hour and a half by car from the hotel. There are seasonal direct flights from the UK. Or it’s an option to touch down in Athens, which is a two-hour drive away. Transfers can be arranged from either airport.
Trains
Automobiles
A car is essential for exploring this pastoral playground. There’s free valet parking at Manna.
Worth getting out of bed for
Manna is in Arcadia, which means it’s a (literal) heaven for pastoral pleasures, with an extensive hiking-trail network (including the Menalon trail), truffle- and mushroom-hunting, canoeing, rafting, cycling, horse-riding and even skiing at the Mainalo resort. As such, Bear Grylls disciples will love it here; activities to reawaken your inner Boy Scout include trekking, archery, survival-tactics training, outdoor cooking, and team-building and survivor games where you can get really competitive. For man-made attractions, look no further than the Temple of Apollo Epicurius or the ancient Byzantine monastery of Timios Prodromos, clinging to a cliff above the Lousios River. Pretty (read ‘cobblestoned’) mountain villages within driving distance include Dimitsana, Stemnitsa, Karytaina, Andritsaina and Vytina (all are within an hour of the hotel). Some of Greece’s best red wine is made over in Nemea. And if you can’t resist a trip (for the devoted, a pilgrimage) to Olympia, the site of the first games (thought to have been held in 776 BC) is around a 90-minute drive away. Also within day-trip distance is the Mani, a must for all Patrick Leigh Fermor fans.
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this harmonious hotel in the Peloponnese and unpacked their assorted local manna (wine, honey, olive oil…), a full account of their bucolic break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside Manna in Arcadia…
It might not officially be a sanatorium anymore, but it’s impossible not to be in perfect harmony after a trip to Manna in the mountains of Arcadia. The listed building was designed by a Swiss architect and owned by a Greek aristocrat, who tended to wounded soldiers and sufferers of tuberculosis in this rural idyll in the Peloponnese. Today, guests can co-exist with nature right here in Utopia, with fir forests, outdoor fireplaces, a sunlounger-lined lily pond and an open-air yoga deck all encouraging you to commune with your leafy surroundings. In keeping with the ‘being at one with nature’ theme, local craftspeople chipped in with the construction by making the furniture, and the palette is unsurprisingly all-neutral, with terrazzo floors, vegan leathers and muntin windows. Outside of the hotel, the earthly paradise has ancient monasteries, clear rivers for rafting (or bathing like a baby Zeus) and cobblestoned mountain villages to explore. Come to convalesce or worship Dionysus – heaven on Earth awaits.
