Every operator on these coasts sells you high summer because that is when people are free. We publish the figures instead and let you decide whether thirty-five degrees is the holiday you had in mind. Nothing on this page is an adjective.
The case, in five figures
Method and boundary. Air temperatures are the ten-year mean daily maximum at the nearest official station to each base, for the middle week of the month named. Sea temperatures are the ten-year mean surface temperature at the nearest coastal buoy for the first week of October. The ferry figure compares recorded foot passengers on the Naxos–Koufonisi route in September against August across the 2022 to 2025 seasons. The last figure is simply our own departure register: no week in July or August since we started in 2015.
Two windows, and a deliberate hole in the middle of the summer. The shoulders are not the cheap end of the season on these coasts — they are the good end, which is the part the brochures never say out loud. Exact opening and closing dates move a fortnight either way with the season and are set when the board opens, usually in the previous November. The board on the weeks page is the only place the actual dates live.
Nothing runs. The guesthouses are shut and most of the families who keep them are somewhere else until the spring.
The first week of the year is mid-April. The sea is warm enough to swim in by early June, though the walking is the reason to come this end of the season.
The months everyone else sells. We do not, and enquiries for them have been turned away since 2015.
The sea is at its warmest in late September — warmer than it ever gets in June. The last week of the year is in early November.
The afternoons get too short for the walking to be worth the airfare, and the coast puts itself away until April.
Written so you could hold us to them. We have deliberately not written a fifth about authenticity, because we could not measure it and neither could you.
Twenty-two to twenty-eight degrees in the middle of the afternoon in the months we run, against thirty-three to thirty-six on the same coasts in August. It is the difference between a walk you remember and a walk you endure, and it is the whole reason the board looks the way it does.
The Mediterranean lags the air by about two months, so the first week of October sits around twenty-four degrees off the Mani and twenty-three off the small Cyclades — warmer than the same water in early June. Autumn weeks are the best swimming weeks we sell.
Foot-passenger traffic on the small-island ferries falls by around sixty per cent between August and September. The same taverna, the same terrace, a third of the people, and the family running it has enough time to sit down with you at the end of it.
Guesthouses on these coasts make their year in eight weeks and then close. Filling ten rooms in April and October is worth disproportionately more to them than the same rooms in August, which is why our partners hold dates for us a year ahead.
The full workbook, with the station identifiers and the ferry data, is a spreadsheet and we will send it to anyone who asks. This is the short version.
Ask and we will email the spreadsheet, station identifiers and all. desk@longmeridian.example
desk@longmeridian.exampleBoth are on one page, with live places on every date. Autumn fills first because of the sea, so if you are looking at late September it is worth holding a place while you think.
See open dates →