Greece is an attractive destination since the very first years tourism came up. Meanwhile, touristic facilities showed up from the very early on Greek ground. Through the years, as the touristic standards were forming in our country, the facilities were evolving and developing in a way they could reciprocate with the constantly changing requirements of the market.
The past few years, especially from 1985 until today, organized package tours are dominating, while mass tourism constitutes an entire industry which increases significantly the percentage of tourists who visit our county.
In order to respond to this phenomenon, hotel owners are turning to adoption of organized touristic resorts, aiming through these enclosed social pocks to cover customers requirements by providing them, apart from accommodation and food, entertainment and amusement comforts.
The springboard of this research is the continuous appearance of these large hotel complexes, which are popping up rapidly in the Greek countryside and forming small individual settlements over already existing ones. These settlements, more or less, are referring to the traditional villages of our country, both in terms of image as well as their organization.
In this research subject, the model of these settlements will be studied, through the examination of eleven of the most representative examples. The study was based primarily on field research and, especially, in discussions I carried out with these settlements’ architects.
Through this research, answers about the strategies that every architect has included in his design are searching out, which are generally associated with the Greek “identity” each settlement propounds, the relationship created between the settlement and the landscape, the inclusion or not of bioclimatic architecture elements and the role of the liquid element, by given the limitations within each architect had to move in, such as legislation, the terrain and the requirements of the owners.