Escape from Planet Neon
The Costa Brava and the Magaluf clones have ruined parts of mainland Spain and Majorca. In Greece, Skiathos is a horror, as is much of Eastern Crete.
The rot is sweeping up the lovely island of Zakynthos. The Fior di Levante is now draped with flashing neon across a good part of the South. And in the North, the builders are at work.
It's time to start compiling places which have kept their own identity. My wife and I recently experienced a region of Greece which might well top the list.
The Pelion peninsula, which is also Mount Pelion and the Forest of Pelion, runs off the eastern mainland of Greece like a crooked finger.
Its little harbour villages face either the Aegean or the Pagasitic Gulf. It is staggeringly beautiful, properly Greek, and, usefully, quite difficult to get to.
A forest on a mountain on a peninsula was a good place, under Turkish rule, for the Greeks to get away from the Turks. Shirley Valentine would be able, in its pleasing little coves, to keep the egg and chips element at a similar distance.
The mountain towers above all the Aegean harbours and runs rather more gently down to the western Pagasitic coast.
In England in 1400, it was possible to walk from Cornwall to Essex under shade. On the rather smaller Pelion, such a shaded journey is still possible.
This is a medieval forest which has renewed itself over centuries. Thanks to the snow and heavy rains of winter, it is a native pre-Forestry Commission English forest, with not a filthy Douglas fir in sight.
A few pines and olives hold the lower slopes, otherwise there is a host of oaks, chestnut and beech.
And, wonderfully, there are apple trees, and random orchards, offering apple blossom at 4,000 feet. The forests have villages, real settlements perched on ledges or nestling in clearances - Makrinitsa, Portaria and Chania.
Travel Guide: Greece