Greek legend has it that Posei-don, god of the sea, separated the island of Evia from Thessaly and Attica with one blow of his trident. If so, he didn’t do a very thorough job of it: at its narrowest, the channel is just 130ft wide, spanned by a bridge that takes only a few moments to cross.

Just over an hour’s drive from Athens, Greek’s second-largest island (only Crete is bigger) has long been a popular weekend spot with the locals, who throng the waterfront bars and restaurants of its bustling capital, Halkida, well into the winter months. Unlike more obvious tourist destinations, such as the Cyclades or the Ionian islands, however, Evia attracts few foreign visitors. You have to look hard to find a cafe offering full English breakfast, or a bar with Sky Sports.

A small but enthusiastic bunch of Britons has begun buying, though – often on the basis of word of mouth – attracted not just by Evia’s 400 miles of coastline and mountains rising to almost 6,000ft, but by the ease of access and the fact that unlike, say, Cephalonia or Crete, it is open for business all year round.

“It’s a working, living community and you have it all the seasons. It’s not one of these places that shuts down in winter,” says David Warmington, a teacher from Clifton upon Teme, Worcestershire, who owns two houses on the island. “Where we live, you’ve got the sea 10 minutes away and snow-capped mountains where you can ski in winter. Athens airport is just an hour away.

“And,” he adds with a sense of relish, “we like the fact that you are not surrounded by loads of British.”

Warmington, 46, and his wife, Sue, 44, came across Evia, also known as Evoia, Euboia and Euboea, during a visit to Greece six years ago, when they were both teaching in Saudi Arabia. As a student, David had done the usual island-hopping thing, but Evia had not been on his itinerary. This time around, they ended up there, visiting Sue’s cousin, Andrew Blackler, who was living in Mytikas, a picturesque community of 4,000 people amid vineyards and olive groves, a few miles inland from Halkida.

“We just loved it – it was completely different and totally Greek,” Warmington says. “We were there for only a week, but at the end, we started to wonder how much land cost. We found ourselves putting in offers to buy, and one was accepted.” They paid just £15,000 for their 1,200-square-metre plot.

With the help of Blackler, a long-term expat who has run various companies in Greece, and his Greek wife, Leanna Patmiou, the Warmingtons found a local architect who built them a three-bedroom, 120-square-metre villa for £60,000. When they decided to add a smaller two-bedroom property, Blackler offered to supervise the work himself; it cost them just £40,000.

The Warmingtons have since travelled several times a year to their properties, but recently let them both out on long-term tenancies to Greeks. They intend to retire there, and next summer will go over for three weeks. “The tenant offered to move up to the mountains to allow us to stay,” Warmington says.

For Blackler, who had built his own house back in 1997, the project was the impulse he needed to move into the property business. Two years later, he gave up his job as manager of a company making air-conditioning units and set up Evia Villas. His original intention was to act as an estate agent, but he soon ran up against a fundamental problem. Once Greeks have bought a property, they are often reluctant to sell, which makes it hard to find suitable stock. “People came to us, but at that point, there weren’t houses of the right type to buy,” he says.

So he started building instead, initially for clients, then, since last year, on his own account. He has been joined by Graham Beaumont, a family friend and surveyor from Totnes, Devon, who became so keen on Evia during years of holidaying there that he moved to the island.

The company has rural plots of building land suitable for a villa for as little as £20,000 for 300 square metres, although most people would want to buy at least double that. The company charges about £85,000 to build a typical three-bedroom, one-bathroom villa; a lavish fourbed, 200-square-metre one would cost about twice as much.

For the time being, at least, the British community on Evia remains small – but it does have some illustrious members, among them Francis Noel-Baker, 87, a former Labour MP. His family has been linked to the island since his grandfather, Edward Noel, a Romantic artist, bought the Achmetaga estate, in Prokopi, north of Halkida, in 1832 with 10,000 gold sovereigns borrowed from Lady Byron.

Noel was among a number of Britons and other western European philhellenes encouraged by the government of the newly independent Greece to buy the estates of the departing Turks, who had ruled the country for the previous 400 years. Most of the properties have since been acquired by Greeks, but Noel’s descendants retained the estate – now rented out in summer at upwards of £3,000 a week.

Properties on such a grand scale as the Achmetaga estate rarely change hands, of course, but the broader property market in Evia, like everywhere else in Greece, has been growing. A big boost came in 2002, when the country swapped the drachma for the euro: interest rates, in double figures until a few years earlier, came down sharply, providing an impulse to developers to build and to buyers to take out mortgages. Prices have been rising by a steady 10%-15% a year since, and Evia has largely escaped the extremes of Athens, where the market surged in the run-up to the 2004 Olympics, but fell back thereafter.

The island’s long-term prospects look good: several Greek companies have been relocating along the motorway that runs northeast out of Athens towards Evia; and, rather than commute out of the congested capital, growing numbers of locals have been looking at the higher quality of life on the island instead.

“Until now, Evia has been a weekend location for Athenians, but that has been changing radically in the past few years,” says Stavros Kamarioutis, chairman of the island’s technical chamber of commerce. “Now large numbers of people are coming to live in Halkida, attracted by property prices that are 60% of those in Athens.”

Regeneration is being helped by improvements to both the motorway and rail networks, which, within a couple of years, will bring Halkida within an hour of the capital. This is good news for tourism, too, but Evia looks unlikely to become a tourist trap any time soon – which will please Keith McPhee, 62, another Briton seduced by the charms of the island. A former policeman from Lancaster, he first visited Evia back in 1989. Six years later, he bought a plot of land near Karystos, a quaint fishing village of 5,000 people that is the capital of the quieter southern part of the island.

McPhee and his wife, Fiona, 50, who is in the travel business, rent out the modern three-bedroom, two-bathroom villa they built on their land for 8-10 weeks a year, but spend both summer and winter holidays there. This Christmas, as last, they will be eating breakfast outside on their terrace or enjoying a slap-up festive meal for 10 in a local taverna for just £50.

“Things started to develop after they introduced the euro,” McPhee says. “A lot of the houses near us have been bought by wealthy Athenians. I have a couple of neighbours who fly in by helicopter for the weekend. But it’s still very traditional; we have a neighbour who goes into town on his donkey every day.

“Near where we live, there is a taverna that has a derelict barn with a car port and a hitching post: often you’ll see a top-of-the-range Mercedes in the car port and a horse and a donkey attached to the hitching post.” To rent the McPhees’ villa, visit www.eviavilla.co.uk

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