Laganas, the party strip on a turtle beach

Until the 1970s Laganas was a handful of farmhouses and fishing huts behind a long, empty beach. In 1991 the village had 233 residents. By 2021 it had 766, and in summer many thousands more sleep in the hotels and studios that have grown along the road to the sea. Most of them come for one thing. Laganas is one of the best-known party resorts in Greece, with more than a hundred bars and clubs, and a summer crowd that is young, loud and largely British.

The heart of it is the main road, which everyone calls the strip. In the daytime it is a sleepy row of shuttered bars, souvenir shops and breakfast cafes serving full English. After dark it changes completely. Promoters work the pavements, bar crawls move from one sound system to the next, and the big names light up in neon: Rescue, the best-known club on the strip, with Sizzle and Zeros a few doors away and dozens of bars in between. Names and owners change from season to season, so treat any list, this one included, as a starting point. The busiest hours are between one and four in the morning, and the season runs roughly from late May to September, peaking in July and August.

Foam parties, pool parties and themed nights are part of the Laganas calendar, but which club runs what, and on which night, changes from summer to summer. The reliable way to find out is on the strip itself, from the posters and the promoters, or on each club's own social pages before you go. Entry, drinks deals and bar-crawl tickets are sold the same way, so compare before you pay.

Then there is the beach. Laganas Bay is the core of the National Marine Park of Zakynthos, created in 1999 as the first national park in the Mediterranean set up to protect sea turtles. The eastern part of Laganas beach is one of the park's six nesting beaches, and from May to August female loggerheads, Caretta caretta, come ashore at night to lay their eggs in the sand. That is why you will see small wooden cages and signs on the beach, why sunbeds stay back from the water, and why the beach is meant to be dark and empty at night. Bonfires, lights and night-time beach parties are exactly what the turtles cannot cope with.

So Laganas asks something of the people who party there. Dance on the strip, not on the sand. Leave the beach to the turtles from dusk to dawn, keep away from the nest cages, and never shine a light or a phone torch at the water's edge, because hatchlings head for the brightest horizon and lights inland lead them the wrong way. In the morning the beach is yours again, and there are few better ways to end a long night than a swim in the calm, shallow water of the bay.