The largest golf complex in the mediterranean

The " Costa Navarino" as such does not exist...
It is the name of an ambitious project of one of Greece's biggest shippowners Vassilos Constantakopoulos, whom everyone calls "Capitano".
Starting in 1984, he continually bought land around the Bay of Navarino to built the largest complex of golf resorts in the mediterranean.
There will be four different areas with colourfull names like Navarino Bay, Navarino Dunes, Navarino Blue and Navarino Hills comprising seven to eleven top class hotels (Starwood und Westin), four to seven 18 hole golf greens, infrastructure for shopping as well as restaurants and bars. All this will be set on roughly 2500 acres of land in one of the touristically least developed areas of Greec. He even won Bernhard Langer and Robert Trent Jr as designers for the greens.

The coast strip called Costa Navarino

Capitano and his son Achilles put in great effort to create the resorts in line with nature, especially since the Bay of Voidokilia to the North of the Bay of Navarino is a famous bird sanctuary. 4500 large olive trees were planted and two huge water reservoirs have been built which also serve the area which is sometimes lacking freshwater. All golf greens will have an underlying pipe system to gain geothermic enrgy.

The first resorts and golf greens will open in spring 2010.

Official homepage of Costa Navarino.

An interesting page about the Navarino project can be found at Facebook.