“There Are Lesbians Everywhere!” – A Journey To The Sleepy Greek Island That Became A Sapphic Mecca 

It was while thrashing through the Aegean sea, in the middle of a shoal of around a hundred other flailing queers, that I realised that I may well have just stumbled upon lesbian paradise.

Ahead of me, the fastest swimmers were already scrambling up to the very top of a jagged outpost known locally as Sappho’s Rock. As I clambered up to catch my breath a few minutes later, a regular member of the Skala Women’s Rock Group swam over to provide a quick potted history. “Proposals, marriages, ash scatterings, and even divorces have all taken place right here on this rock,” she tells me, before very kindly warning me that I’m about to sit on a lump of poisonous algae.

The mass-swim had been organised by the local swimming group as part of Queer Ranch Festival, which is run by local collective OHANA, and takes place here every May on the Greek island of Lesbos. Alongside beach raves, workshops and club nights, visitors can also pop up to the ranch to meet the collective’s many rescue animals – who are looked after using the profits from the festival.

Fellow swimmer Sandy, who is also visiting Lesbos for the first time from London, likens her trip to a pilgrimage. “I felt this immense connection, both to the dykes around me and the ones that had come before,” she says of the swim. “It was almost like a spiritual feeling. It sounds really stupid, but you can’t get the term ‘lesbian’ without Lesbos.”

The word ‘lesbian’ traces its roots back to this very island – the birthplace of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who gave voice to desire between women over 2,500 years ago. Though much of her poetry has been lost to time, the fragments that remain still burn with longing. “Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time,” she wrote – and someone did. That memory has turned the island’s once-sleepy village of Skala Eressos, believed to be Sappho’s hometown, into a modern-day mecca for queer women. For decades, thousands have made the pilgrimage here each year. Though the journey began organically, as a kind of return to lesbian roots, many of those early visitors simply never left – sticking around to set up everything from lesbian cafes to cat rescue sanctuaries – and news gradually spread by word of mouth.

Later, the well-established International Eressos Women’s Festival (which has taken place here each September since 2000) gave the village another, more substantial tourism boost. An estimated 3,000-4,000 lesbians now make the trip here each summer.

I first heard about Sappho while studying poetry at university years ago, and was surprised at how little anybody seemed to know about her. Though we have no way of knowing for sure, the popular story goes that much of her work was lost because the Church disapproved of her morals. Compared to her male contemporaries, Sappho is a ghostly figure, her legacy stitched together from surviving fragments of lyric poetry. I was first pulled to Skala Eressos because I loved the idea of retracing the steps of people just like me from thousands of years ago – queerness is often carelessly hailed as a modern-day phenomenon, and yet here was the overwhelming evidence that it has been around for millennia. So when I heard about Queer Ranch Festival, I booked tickets on the spot. A celebration of queerness in the very place that once nurtured one of history’s most iconic queer voices – it felt like a homecoming to somewhere I’d never been.

“I was first pulled to Skala Eressos because I loved the idea of retracing the steps of people just like me from thousands of years ago – queerness is often carelessly hailed as a modern-day phenomenon, and yet here was the overwhelming evidence that it has been around for millennia”

Wandering down the village’s seafront for the very first time, I almost immediately stumbled across Flamingo, a lesbian bar where every new arrival is greeted like a long-lost friend. Between dishing out beers to an ever-expanding circle of regular customers, owner Anita tells me she bought the place – which has been here “forever” – on a whim seven years ago.

“I’m a bit of a singer,” Anita, who spent 30 years visiting as a tourist before moving out here, tells me. On one visit, she convinced the old owners of Flamingo to give her a gig singing in the bar. “After that, we became friends.” When they got fed up and fancied retiring, they offered to sell it to her. Anita called up her friend Joanne in England, and they both decided ‘why not?’. “That’s literally how it happened. Neither of us have run a bar before,” she laughs.

“A lot of women keep coming back here every year,” Anita adds. “Actually, they call it The Mothership. I think it’s because we’re a bit older and we like to look after people. People feel safe here. We’ve even had people sleeping under the deck!”

Still, it’s not just bars like Flamingo that welcome Sapphic guests with open arms. Everybody I speak to seems delighted by the annual influx of “Lesbian ladies” – though at one point a server in a seafood restaurant admitted that she can’t wait for a couple of days off to swim and sunbathe in peace. “When is this festival over?!” she joked, emitting a comedy groan. Though most locals seemed totally nonplussed, there were occasional flickers of tension – rumours of neighbourly noise complaints swirled following club nights on the seafront, and a handful of tourists who were leaving very little to the imagination on the main beach were sternly sent in the direction of a nearby nudist area.

That sense of belonging isn’t just felt – it’s being documented. Later in the week, I met up with Mullet Film, the London-based queer filmmakers who have explored the intergenerational communities co-existing in Skala Eressos for new documentary Ranch, which screened at London’s Genesis Cinema earlier this month. Director Florence Bass originally started visiting Skala Eressos after her mum came out as a lesbian later in life and “really found her community” here in the Greek village. “I came out with her when I was at the start of my own queer journey and I immediately saw what was so special about the place,” she says.

It’s a story that mirrors many others’ on the island – where generations overlap, chosen families are formed and the sense of freedom feels almost radical. That radical softness is something the filmmakers are trying to capture onscreen.

“Skala Eressos doesn’t just offer queer joy; it offers queer future. A glimpse of what life could look like when we grow older together, with love, without shame”

“There’s something truly unique about coming here,” adds Mullet Film co-founder and video editor Lydia Bowden. “There are lesbians everywhere, which is very surreal!” she laughs. “But beyond that, it’s this feeling of safety that really stays with you. You can walk home alone at night without a second’s thought – and, most of all, you can hold your partner’s hand freely, without fear or self-consciousness. It’s one of the only places in the world where that kind of ease feels completely natural.”

That feeling clearly resonates. I heard variations of it again and again – often from first-time visitors still adjusting to the emotional impact of being somewhere where queerness isn’t just accepted, but expected. “I’ve never felt so at ease” agrees Alex, who was also visiting the village for the first time. Yesterday, they saw an older couple quietly enjoying a swim together in the sea. “My friend said to me: ‘It just makes me believe that when we get there, it’ll be nice.’” Alex grew up in Kent, a county that kept its own version of Section 28 (the UK law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, and was widely repealed in 2003) in place right up until 2010. “[As a child, I] was taught that being gay meant I’d always be alone,” they say. A place like this, they add, is “something that 15-year-old me has always needed”.

This line stayed with me. Because for all the sun and sea and music, there’s something deeper unfolding here – a quiet kind of healing. Skala Eressos doesn’t just offer queer joy; it offers queer future. A glimpse of what life could look like when we grow older together, with love, without shame.

Sometime after 2am, dancing in the sand to LYNK’s dance-pop anthem Str8 Acting, it hit me. I was surrounded by hundreds of queers, bodies moving, hands in the air, completely unbothered – and for the first time in forever, we were the majority. I suddenly realised: this is what straight people must feel like all the time. Not euphoric – just safe. Ordinary. Unremarkable.

The only thing missing on Lesbos? That familiar flicker of anxiety – the instinct to drop my girlfriend’s hand as we pass a group of strangers, or glance over my shoulder before kissing her. Here, that vigilance melted away. And if that doesn’t count as a lesbian paradise, I don’t know what does.