Firopotamos

The nearest bay to Mandrakia in a westerly direction is Firopotamos. Here too you start off in Pera Triovasalos but here the road has a clean tar surface and is disproportionately wide. There is also a road down from Plakes as well as a cross connection if you are coming from Plathiena.

Outside the season, Firopotamos is a quiet place with a few houses, brightly coloured sirmata (boathouses) and a pretty church that you absolutely must visit. However, like so many small beaches on Milos, in the summer it quickly gets noisy and busy. It’s almost impossible to imagine today but Firopotamos once had a completely different, to be specific industrial, character. Because here in the 1960’s they used to process and haul away kaolin. There are still some remains of these installations to be found.

The beach at Firopotamos is nothing special since the immediate proximity of the boathouses and parking cars, in combination with the limited parking spaces, hardly provides a relaxing atmosphere. Nevertheless, the whole bay is worth seeing. It lies in a deep cut between steep cliffs and with its shallow, crystal clear water, it looks like a tropical lagoon – as long as you ignore the absence of palms. That was my first impression anyway, which I still remember well. If you follow a footpath just before Firopotamos through a small side valley, an impressive view of the bay is revealed. It looks completely undisturbed since the beach, the road and the few houses are hidden from that viewpoint.