A Guide to Matala, Crete by Ben Mallalieu

I always regretted not going to Matala. One night in the early 70s, I was sleeping on a park bench in Munich in the snow, but the police woke me up: "If you cannot afford a hotel, you should go home," they said in that very sensible Germanic way, but it wasn't a decade for being sensible. I walked around the city for a couple of hours then sat shivering on the steps of a locked railway station where a bearded hippie spent the rest of the night telling stories about a miraculous beach in Crete called Matala where the sun shone all winter and you could sleep in caves and live for next to nothing.

But I was set on heading east, and by the time I returned to Europe Matala's best days were officially over. All that remained was Joni Mitchell's catchy, optimistic song, Carey, which celebrated drinking wine at the Mermaid Cafe, getting beach tar on your feet and listening to scratchy rock and roll beneath a Matala moon, a eulogy for the time before aids, mortgages, Thatcherism and heroin. Every time I heard it I wished I'd gone to Matala.

Matala's Hippy Roots

It was the first famous hippy beach and a lot of respectable people got seriously upset about it. Bohemians behaving badly had been a feature of many European beaches throughout the 20th century, but this was somehow different, something new and worse, although now it's hard to work out why.

Perhaps it was because hippies didn't seem to care about money ("worthless, sponging idlers" said the otherwise sensible travel writer Ernle Bradford; perhaps rich idlers were acceptable) Maybe it was the drugs; even the better Greek governments have never approved of cannabis - too Turkish (Turkish governments don't approve of it either, for much the same reason) - and those were mad days under the Colonels.

But by most accounts the hippies and the Matala locals coexisted reasonably happily. Young Greeks were impressed, particularly the national servicemen stationed in southern Crete who thought it a much better lifestyle than fighting for colonel and country.

The Mermaid Cafe didn't survive the 70s. The owner had built an extension to his kitchen without the correct permission - hardly a serious offence, particularly in Greece - but he was thrown in prison and tortured, and his cafe was closed. The caves were fenced off with barbed wire and the party was over. They paved the streets, built a large car park and Matala became popular with package tours.

When I finally got there nearly 40 years late, I wasn't hitchhiking any more, nor sleeping on park benches and beaches, and our hotel room came complete with clean white linen, if not with fancy French cologne.

Modern-Day Changes

In Joni Mitchell's time, there were a few small single-storey houses, not particularly beautiful, two beach cafes and a grocery shop. Now, it has a few hundred buildings, none bigger than three storeys, and none particularly ugly although you'd have to look hard to find any that aren't apartments, gift shops or tavernas.

The old graffiti on the sea wall - "Welcome to Matala George. Today is life. Tomorrow never comes" - has been repainted with more flowery, more obviously 60ish lettering. You can buy "Today is life" T-shirts. But despite the package tour commercialism, Matala has retained a slightly raffish hippy air. You can even find a few recidivist old wrecks of the "never trust anyone under 30" variety who may have been there ever since the 60s - it's a bit like going to a pub at opening time and finding it full of drunks from the night before.

There are also some younger, fashion-statement Euro-hippies with blond dreadlocks, and American babyboomers looking for the misspent youth they might have had if they hadn't accepted the graduate trainee place at General Motors or IBM. But most people are typical tourists, although not many are English and even fewer are Greek.

The side of the bay with the cliffs and caves has been left undeveloped with a grove of dusty evergreen trees I couldn't identify next to the beach. Perhaps there is a preservation order on them. I asked the waiter at the Lions taverna what they are called. "They are just trees," he said confidently. "They don't have a name."

The town is not at its best in the afternoon when the beach fills up with coachloads of Russians (like German tourists but with more clothes) on day excursions from the big resorts along the coast. They are interested in the hippies - a moment in recent history that completely passed them by - and I overheard a group asking the man renting deckchairs what the village was like then, but he didn't know. He wasn't there either.

Red Beach: A Matala Gem

But Red Beach, just south of Matala, has hardly changed, undeveloped because it can only be reached by a 25-minute scramble over the headland, a bit of a slog on the first day, easy by the end of the week. The cliffs are the colour of rock candy, the earth covered in fine white dust. Crete must have been like this in Minoan times. The light is blinding, the silence almost deafening.

Red Beach still has only one old building, boarded up and painted with a flaking mural. In recent years, a Belgian sculptor has carved animals and ancient Egyptian patterns in the rocks. The sand is some of the best in Crete, large grained and soft to walk on with outcrops of black granite smoothed and sculpted by the sea. The water is safe, protected by cliffs on either side, and warm enough for swimming long after autumn has come and gone in England.

In the evening when the crowds had gone, we sat outside the Lions, a proper taverna with real Greek food and not a microwave in sight, and we drank Cretan wine and watched the sunlight on the caves. Sunsets don't change. The night is still full of stars, slightly obscured by the floodlights, and old rock and roll still drifts across the water - Bob Dylan's 119th Dream, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, lots of Bob Marley - from the other bars.

From a distance, the caves look like a natural phenomenon, but close to you can see that they are man made, even older than Petra, carved into the rose-red stone in early classical times and full of echoes of earlier occupants, most of them much older than the hippies. They may (or not) have been dug in the Minoan era; the Roman used them as catacombs and lepers lived there in the days when beautiful beaches were not at a premium. The heat of the sun has sunk deep into the rock keeping it warm at night and possibly all winter. I could see myself in the 1970s living in a cave with a cheesecloth curtain over the doorway and a sleeping bag on the stone bed, and I wouldn't have needed much else in those days. But you can't sleep there any more.

The paper tablecloths in the Lions Taverna show a map of Crete with, just below it, the tiny island of Gavdos. "What's Gavdos like?" I asked the manager. He looked at me sadly, as though fearing that he might be losing another customer. "It's like Matala was 30 years ago," he said.