Vatera
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Vatera is an 7-kilometer long sandy beach in the southern part of Lesbos island. The name (Βατερά) comes from βάτα (vata): prickly bushes that blocked the old mule-drive access.
It is 55Km in total from Mytilini. The 7Km long, sandy beach here, backed by vegetated hills and looking out to Hios and Psara, offers some of the warmest, cleanest swimming on Lesvos. Several decent hotels and taverns with traditional tastes are across the biggest beach on the island.
The Vatera area hit the Greek news in 1997 when a palaeontologist, Michael Dermitzakis, confirmed what farmers unearthing bones had long suspected when he announced that the area was a treasure trove of fossils, including bones of two-million-year-old gigantic horses, mastodons, monkeys and tortoises, the latter the size of a small car.
Until 20000 years ago, Lesvos was joined to the Asian mainland, and the gulf of Vatera was a subtropical freshwater lake, the animals in question came to drink, died nearby and were trapped and preserve by successive volcanic flows. In Vrissa the University of Athens have established a Natural history collection dedicated to the pale ontological finds. 3Km west you can gaze out to the cape of Agios Fokas, where foundations and columns stubs remain of the temple of Dionysos and an early Christian basilica.
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