Acro Suites

Crete

On a bright, cloudless afternoon at Acro Suites, a hillside hotel on the northern coast of Crete, I sat by the pool, built in a ring around a raw, rocky hill planted with aloe and sawgrass. At its peak was a mirrored obelisk, reflecting the gradated blues of the sky and sea, the blinding gold of the sun, and the deep green of the mountains in the distance.

Across from me, Konstantina Orfanake, the hotel’s co-founder, was explaining that the chairs we sat in were hand-built using Cretan wood; that there wasn’t a single tile at the 43-room property, only Cretan marble laid by local stonemasons; that every plant, palm, and flower I saw was native to this part of the island.

Konstantina was born and raised in Crete, and she wanted Acro Suites to showcase where she’d grown up. She also wanted it to reflect the kind of homespun wellness she’d been practicing since she was a kid.

“For us, wellness is a lifestyle,” she said. “We’ve always loved the Mediterranean diet and great quality food. We grew up next to the water, working out and fishing and swimming. We wanted to take all these things and highlight them as a way of living.”

Tapping into that way of living felt effortless at Acro Suites. I ate fresh fruit for breakfast, fresh vegetables and dips for lunch, and fresh fish for dinner. In the afternoons, I’d walk down a long, winding stone path to the beach, where I’d swim out to a string of buoys a quarter-mile from shore and back again. I fell asleep before midnight and woke up with the sun.

I slept so well in part, I think, because I spent an hour a day at the hotel’s gym, where sunlight poured through floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the coastline, and where Theo, the hotel’s in-house personal trainer, had convinced me to join his CrossFit classes. As I threw heavy rope against the ground, hoisted weights above my head, and hucked medicine balls at the wall, Theo would gently, silently correct every mistake I made, mirroring what I was supposed to be doing without speaking. He was—intentionally, I thought—avoiding drawing attention to me, sparing me from judgment. Every time I made an adjustment, no matter how slight or ineffective, he gave me a kind of jubilant salute.

Nothing felt better than getting in the plunge pool on my patio after a CrossFit session (a deeply ridiculous clause I could never have imagined writing before I came to Greece). Floating, sighing, feeling the tension leave my muscles as the lactic acid bound up in them dissolved, I thought of nothing. There was only here, and only now: just the water, and the sun, and the wind, and the sky, and under and inside it all, me.

Source:thrillist.com