The Romanos

Vassilis Constantakopoulos went to sea from a Messinian village and came back a shipowner, one of the biggest in Greece. In the mid-1980s he settled on a second, harder project. Messinia was emptying, its people leaving for Athens and abroad, and he wanted a reason for them to stay. The plan was a resort that would put this quiet stretch of the Peloponnese on the map without hollowing it out. In 1997, having quietly assembled much of the land, some of it plot by plot from villagers who had known his family, he founded the company, TEMES, that would build it.

It took another thirteen years. The first phase, Navarino Dunes, opened in 2010 with two five-star hotels sharing the site, The Romanos and The Westin. Constantakopoulos died the following year, in 2011, with the thing he had spent three decades on barely a season old. That history explains what a guest notices before anyone tells them: the olive groves mapped and replanted rather than cleared, the buildings kept low under the tree line, the sense that the resort was made to sit in Messinia rather than to be set down on top of it.

The Romanos is the more classical of the two founding hotels, travertine and column and mosaic, a lobby that opens straight onto the water. There are 321 rooms, suites and villas, from the mid-forties of square metres up to beachfront villas past 140, and 128 of them come with a private infinity pool, the deck a few paces from the sand. Anazoe Spa, four thousand square metres of it, is the reason many people book: treatments built on the old Messinian materials, olive oil and honey and herbs, some of them drawn from the Mycenaean world just up the road at Nestor's Palace.

The scale is real, and honest about itself. This is a resort you settle into for a week, not a boutique bolthole, and a full house is a full house. What the land buys back is quiet. The peninsula is large enough, and the planting old enough, that a villa can feel like a house of its own, the sea a few steps past the reeds. That room to disappear is the rarer luxury here, rarer than the marble.

Dinner spreads across the resort rather than gathering at one flagship. Barbouni sits on the beach for a long seafood lunch, Da Luigi runs the length of Italy, Flame is the grill, and Armyra by Papaioannou brings the Athens fish name south, with the Souvlakerie for the late, unfussy end of the evening. The best of it leans on Messinian produce, the olive oil above all, which is the region's true export. Outside, golf is a serious part of the pitch. The Dunes Course, laid out beside the hotel, opened in May 2010 as the first signature course in Greece, designed by Bernhard Langer; the Bay Course, a short drive off and by Robert Trent Jones Jr., runs two of its holes along the historic Bay of Navarino.

And that bay is the point. Pylos and its harbour, the sand crescent of Voidokilia, the Venetian walls of Methoni, the ruins of Nestor's Palace, all of it within half an hour, which turns a beach week into something you can actually explore. Big resorts rarely earn a place in VANE. This one does on its setting, and on the Messinia the captain wrapped around it.