- The Guardian
Tuesday 30 July 2019 9
Klum, the singer Nicole Scherzinger
and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
For extra privacy, famous faces
can rent a cabana , complete with an
outdoor jacuzzi and butler: a snip at
€5,000 a day. Cabanas at an equally
pretty but far from glamorous beach
a 10-minute drive away are €10.
Mykonos has been attracting
tourists since the 1920s, when
archaeologists and antiquity hunters
used it as a base to visit the ancient
Greek ruins on neighbouring Delos.
It came of age in the 60s when the
former US fi rst lady Jackie Kennedy
Onassis visited with her second
husband, the shipping tycoon
Aristotle Onassis. Following her lead
came Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot and
Sophia Loren. There are two bars
and a hotel dedicated to Jackie O
on the island. The island became a
destination for gay visitors in the
70s, when the Italian-American
painter Pierro Aversa and a local
fi sherman, Andreas Koutsoukos, set
up Pierro’s, an LGBT-friendly bar.As is often
the case, where the celebrities go,
the super-rich follow. Psarou Bay
proved particularly popular
because it is a natural deepwater
harbour protected from the
notorious meltemi north winds.
It is thus a perfect spot for
billionaires to moor their
superyachts. There are 11 of them
at anchor when I visit, including
the Maltese Falcon, a $300m
(£240m) three-mast sail-powered
superyacht built for the Silicon
Valley venture capitalist Tom
Perkins. The six-cabin yacht is
available to charter for €480,000 a
week including jet skis and water
jetpacks. It has reportedly been
hired by Google’s co-founder Larry
Page and the actors Tom Hanks and
Hugh Jackman.
For those without sea legs,
Nammos off ers a private heliport
a few hundred metres inland. If you
don’t have a helicopter, chartering
one for the 35-minute journey to
Athens will set you back €3,500.
Seeing how much money rich
visitors were dropping at the
restaurant and beach bar, Nammos’s
owners expanded into luxury
shopping. They transformed the land
behind the bar into Nammos Village ,
an enclave of 20 luxury boutiques.
Kate Moss DJed at the opening party
last year. In the Dior store, Breton-
stripe tops emblazoned with “J’Adior
Mykonos” sell for €1,200. They are
a Mykonos exclusive.
As well as the Gucci, Burberry
and Louis Vuitton stores, there’s the
Eden art gallery, where works by the
graffi ti artist Alec Monopoly cost
more than €200,000. Monopoly (not
his real name; he wears a bandana
at all times to conceal his identity)
and his gallery clearly know their
audience. “In Nammos, pretty much
every person who comes in here can
PHOTOGRAPHS: ALAMY; GETTY; REX/SHUTTERSTOCKbuy everything,” says the gallerist,
the Canadian billionaire and Uber
co-founder Garrett Camp. Tickets
for Camp’s Aero service, which
launched last week , cost about
€800 one-way on the 16-seater CRJ-
200 plane. Aero’s Jaimee Zullo says
the company created the route after
clubbers complained of the diffi culty
of travelling between the two party
islands, which normally requires
a change of planes and can take hours.
The number of international
visitors to Mykonos airport, which
is undergoing a €25m upgrade,
increased by a fi fth to 282,000 in the
fi rst six months of 2019 compared
with 2018. Every day during the
peak season in August, more than
200 planes , including a signifi cant
number of private jets, take off or
land at the airport. Alexander Zinell,
the boss of the airport operator
Fraport Greece, says the airportoverhaul will include two new VIP
lounges when it opens in 2021.
For those without their own
superyacht, sleeping options
include fi ve-star hotels or ultra-
luxurious villas, one of which is
available to rent for more than £1m
a month. Roi Deldimou, the manager
of the Mykonos branch of the London
luxury estate agent Beauchamp
Estates, says Villa Tamarisk “is one
for billionaires and VIPs”.
“Words can’t do it justice,” she
says of the villa, which has near-270-
degree sea views on a cliff overlooking
Mykonos town and the all-important
sunset. “The views are so good, it is
like a balcony in the Aegean.”
Deldimou says the villa is the
biggest private house on Mykonos,
at 1,400 sq metres, and may be the
largest on all of the Greek islands.
Size is important for rich clients, as
“billionaires are used to living in big
houses and it can be very hard to
confi ne them in small villas”.
The villa comes complete with
live-in staff. “There’s everything
you can need 24 hours a day,”
Deldimou says. “There’s a butler, a
chef and a sous chef , two waiters and
a laundry room.” The eight-bedroom,
nine-bathroom villa also boasts
an outdoor entertaining area that
can seat 120. At €330,000 a week,
the villa is more than €100,000 more
expensive than the second-most-
pricey rental home on the island.
“A lot [of customers] come from
London,” Deldimou says. “ It may say
they are British in their passports,
but they are not British in origin. It
is easy for them to come to Mykonos
from London; it is just three and
a half hours in their private jet.”
Some locals complain that the
infl ux of wealthy holidaymakers has
pushed up the prices of all homes on
the island, making it diffi cult to fi nd
an aff ordable place to live. Nick, who
works for a car rental company, says
his rent on a small house inland has
risen from €400 to €600 a month,
which he says is two or three times
the Greek average. “There have been
tourists coming here for ever, but
there are a lot more now and they are
a lot richer and spend a lot of money.
Local people want some of it, so they
put their places on Airbnb, which
means there are fewer houses for us
to rent and the prices are going up.”
On the other hand, he says, “ the
pay is also much higher in Mykonos.
The tourists have caused the prices
to rise, but they have also created
a lot of jobs that pay well.”
Many of the staff working in the
bars, restaurants and hotels have
relocated here for the season. Some
are from mainland Greece, where the
youth unemployment rate is 40%,
but word of the money to be made on
Mykonos has travelled far and wide.
Yazar Abbsa, 18, has come from
Pakistan to sell clothes on the beach
in the day and clean cars and learn
English and Greek in the evenings.
“There’s a lot more money to be
made here than in Pakistan or in
Athens,” Abbsa says as he waits for
a lift to Super Paradise beach from
Ano Mera, the inland town where
seasonal workers live, often in
dormitory-like conditions. “It’s hard
working here, but it’s better than
anywhere else I’ve tried.”Akaash Mehta. “That’s what this
place was engineered for.”
The fi rst work seen upon entering
depicts the banker from Monopoly
at the helm of a yacht with Disney’s
Scrooge McDuck in the background.
The price is €250,000. Other works in
Eden Mykonos include a giant black
and silver American Express credit
card embossed with “Your Name
Here”. Mehta says there is no hidden
meaning to the works – they’re simply
“about money, with Monopoly
characters and [themes] showing
the aspects of life of the wealthy”.
There are no fi shermen left in
Nammos; they have all sold out to
property developers, according to
staff at the bar and elsewhere. It’s
not the only place on the island to
have been transformed to meet the
demands of the super-rich. In 2015,
German friends Thomas Heyne and
Mario Hertel bought Scorpios bar on
a promontory across the bay from
Nammos and set about transforming
it into another super-luxury party
destination, also off ering wellness
activities including yoga and
psychedelic breathing classes.
Elena, one of three Scorpios
hostesses welcoming guests who
arrive by road (the others are
stationed on the jetty to welcome
those arriving by sea ) says that I’ve
missed the big parties, which are on
Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.
“There can be a line out there of
2,000 to 3,000 people,” she says,
adding that the bar’s policy is “never
to play any Greek music”.
Famous faces are regularly
spotted at Scorpios, but Elena says
she doesn’t always recognise them.
“We had Gigi Hadid here, but I didn’t
know who she was. The restaurant
was closing in 10 minutes and I said:
‘If you’re ready and know what you
want to order, then OK, just this
once ...’ Then afterwards the other
girls said: ‘Elena, come on – it’s
Gigi Hadid. She can have dinner
whenever she wants.’”
Scorpios proved such a hit with
London’s arts and media set that
this year the private members’ club
Soho House bought it in a deal that
included the 40-room San Giorgio
hotel next door. The sale price was
not disclosed.
One of Scorpios’ top DJs, Jean
Claude Ades , who takes to the
decks for the Sunday night parties,
commutes to Mykonos from his
home on Ibiza on a new private-
jet sharing service launched byFor extra
privacy, you can
rent a cabana
with jacuzzi and
butler – a snip at
€5,000 a day
Breton tops
costing
€1,200 in
the Dior storeArtworks
are simply
‘about money’Kate Moss with
the DJ Fat Tony
Marnach at the
launch of
Nammos VillageLuxury
shopping at
the Nammos
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