PYLOS, Greece – Lost in a maze could be a scene straight out of my recurring nightmare. But not so when located amidst lush olive groves in the Messinia region on Greece’s southwest Peloponnese coast.
My wife and I were winding through the maze-like grid of paths at the sumptuous Romanos Resort, the first of four ultra-luxury hotels to open at Costa Navarino, and this was more like a dream replete with four challenging and very different golf courses at our disposal. A wrong turn brought us to the healing pools of a world-class spa or stumbling onto white-sand beaches. Should we go left or right? Every turn felt like the start of a choose-your-own adventure, and we weren’t alone in this thinking. When Greek tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas, who reached as high as No. 3 in the world and enjoys playing at the resort’s grass tennis court, the only one in the country, was asked what he liked most about the resort, he didn’t hesitate.
“You can play hide-and-seek here and never find each other,” Tsitsipas was quoted as saying in Costa Navarino Magazine. “Just getting lost in nature … that’s what I love about this place.”
It took a few days but eventually I got lost in the beauty of it all too.
I first was introduced to Costa Navarino while attending the 2019 International Association of Golf Tour Operators annual summit in Marrakech, Morocco, where a representative of its marketing team shared with me the story of Capt. Vassilis Constantakopoulos, one of the world’s wealthiest shipping magnates, who was born in a small village near Costa Navarino and always loved this region. Twenty years before he died (in 2011), the self-made businessman bought thousands of acres, intending to develop part of it to revitalize the struggling local communities and to stop the flood of young men leaving for Athens. He was a golfer and chose to make the game one of the primary draws for people the world over to come and discover the beauty of Messinia. I remember telling my wife, Kristen, that someday I wanted to take her there, but just a few months later COVID hit and so for the next few years I stared at the marketing brochure, which I kept piled atop a folder of story ideas in my office. Initially, Kristen and I were planning to tour Rome and vacation elsewhere in Italy in October after the Ryder Cup concluded, but deep down what we really needed was to get our golf fix. So, when a PR person pitched me that Costa Navarino was only a two-hour flight…
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