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Wild parties and ignored curfews – a dispatch from Greece's new Covid-19 hot spot

zante nightlight
zante nightlight

With Scotland and Wales’ announcement that UK travellers returning from Zante will have to quarantine, following hot on the heels of Tui no longer offering holiday packages to one of the island's resorts, Laganas, local business owners are worried Boris Johnson will be pressured into removing the UK’s air corridor with Greece.

“It’s crazy, because recent figures show that Greece is still well below the UK’s 20 cases per 100,000 inhabitants benchmark,” said Colum McLornan, founder of solo travel company Friendship Travel. “Also this problem is very specific to the Laganas area. In Argassi, half an hour along the coast where most of my groups are based, locals and visitors alike are respecting Covid measures, using correct social distancing and wearing masks.”

On an average summer night along Laganas’ Vegas-like one-mile Strip in the centre of town – where clubs lure punters inside with the promise of big name DJs and ‘free’ bars for five euros – the pavements are awash with vomit, broken glass and wasted clubbers.

Zante
Zante

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Post-Covid there are more masks in evidence, but the vibe is basically the same. “It’s ironic that we have curfew from midnight to 7am across the island when it’s just a very small group of partygoers who are causing the problem - especially as by mid-September they’ve all gone back to school or university and the problem disappears,” McLornan said.

A seasonal worker along The Strip, who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of backlash from local businesses, tells me there was a big police presence in Laganas on Tuesday night. Since then however, she says that ‘things are back to normal’ with wild parties on the beach until well after midnight, little or no social distancing and some clubs staying open until dawn.

“I’m with a business that has really struggled this summer and will now close owing to the situation,” she said. “Most bars and clubs have respected the rules and all the big event companies have scrapped the parties. It’s just a few idiots who have spoilt it for everyone.”

Joel Harper, brand manager for VVIP Zante, the island’s leading provider of event packages, agrees. “Our season has been a catastrophe - we refunded more than 4,000 event tickets and were the only event company in Zante who did this. We attempted to run a socially sensible sunset cruise, so we reduced capacity by 50 percent, had mandatory masks on the coach transfer, health forms filled out, temperature checks upon boarding, no shots from the bottle, etc, but the whole thing was misrepresented on social media, so we decided to cancel all our club and white party events after that.”

Elsewhere, Greek officials are appalled at the behaviour of British clubbers. “The images in Laganas are worrying – I cannot believe that some people still gather on the beaches after the bars are closed,” MP Dionysos Aktypis said to local newspaper Imera Zante on September 2.

The seasonal worker agrees. “There are even beach parties organised by [Instagram account] Zante Bible called 'F*** Covid-19’. For them it's just a running joke - they don’t care about Covid at all.”