Kimon, a young cousin of the famous late photographer Leni Riefenstahl, had recently taken over the management of the place where I was staying, which had grown from the family property where his father, Otto, and his Greek mother, Danai (for whom the resort is named), had built a house in the late seventies. It is now a contender for the most luxurious in this corner of Europe.

Kimon's father is a Grecophile, and Kimon is more easily taken for Greek than German. The family's love of this country is exemplified in the way they've married the vernacular-style buildings of their site with the landscape overlooking the beach—except, oddly enough, for the pink and sassy house they first built and divided into family apartments.

The suites offer more luxury than I'd ever need. The marble bathrooms are big enough to give dinner parties in, the top-of-the-line TVs swivel electronically to follow the viewer. The furniture, collected by Kimon's mother, is an amalgam of antiques and up-to-date pieces. The towels are signed by Missoni and Greece's Yannis Tseklenis, the toiletries by Herm&@232;s.

The latest addition to the resort is a spa designed to echo, in its detailed ceramics and metal, the decor of Europe's grand nineteenth-century spas while using the latest in technology. The Danai would make anyone unused to pampering feel nothing short of guilty, but it's all delivered by an informal, congenial staff, and the skills of both the French and the Turkish chefs cannot be faulted.

There is nothing else in the region like the Danai, and if you want a unique blend of the pristine nature of Sithonia and of urbane luxury, this is the place. It is, however, far from cheap, and if I had truly rejected luxury I would happily have stayed at the small, clean hotels on Sithonia. They remind me of those built in Greece long ago, as it outgrew being a place where, to stay overnight, you had to rent a room in a fisherman's house. I'm not the only one fond of those simple places that gave off, in the cool of their interiors, the spicy odors of fresh cement and whitewash, while newly planted roses, jasmine, or bougainvillea braved the sun outside.

There is also nearby Porto Carras, a striking piece of recent history where the European Union held a summit meeting and where you might want to stay and should at least visit. It was the 17,630-acre dream resort of the late John Carras, an elegant Anglophile Greek shipping magnate who thought he could beneficently transform Halkidiki from a sleepy peninsula of decaying fishing villages into a magnet for upscale vacationers.

In the seventies, I visited Porto Carras with John himself, who waxed enthusiastic about the 45,000 olive trees he'd planted; the vineyard he'd created with France's greatest oenologist, Emile Peynaud; the yacht port dug from scratch; and, among the other buildings, a boldly contemporary structure that, alas, would be echoed by hotels which went up like giant radiators all along the Mediterranean. Inside, it's spacious and cleanly modern these days, with the air of an architectural monument, which it may well be. But John Carras's dream has failed to awaken Halkidiki to an era of tourism, for which I am thankful.