Kefalas! What's it Like?

It’s only a small village and not a lot there, about 5 or 10 minutes drive to Vamos which has everything there.
Very narrow streets with not a lot of room when you drive through Kefalas. Look at Crete Island estates and Minoan properties in Kalyves, they seem to have property for sale in that area.

It’s quiet apart from the dogs, cockerels, sheep, church and goat bells, plus the Easter celebrations! Do come here for PasXa!

A few of the locals speak English fluently. Some speak rudimentary English and some speak hardly any. So it’s a village where you can certainly "get by" without learning Greek but you’ll miss out on a lot. It has a relatively large percentage of English speaking foreigners, as mentioned in a previous post and even larger in summer when those with holiday homes arrive.

It’s a place where no rich people live (or very few) and many people live in virtual poverty. I know one local who lives on 300 Euros per month.

It has ADSL broadband available with a reasonable download speed, generally, of 3.5 Mbps or better. However, if you want this, be sure to make it a condition of purchase and don’t hand over any cash until it’s installed and working. That’s what we did and it was working after only 10 days! I think other people are still waiting.

In summer the water supply can run dry at the highest points of the village so it’s best to choose a house that is 100m lower and have a 1000 litre reserve water tank on the roof. At that level, you won’t need an expensive, unreliable pump.

If the house looks onto open land, you want a garden, you’ll need a very high fence because the local goats can jump quite high. This doesn’t apply everywhere – only where the Nikos lets his goats run loose to graze. There are sheep, too, but a metre high wall with 0.5m fence on top suffices for those. Double this for goats.