Wooden tables and chairs on a patterned grey and white tile floor in the dining room at Taverna Velco

Potam · Himarë

The room

You sit under a pitched roof of stained timber, open at the sides so the air moves through. Bunches of dried herbs and long strings of seashells hang from the rafters between strip lights and a few bare filament bulbs on cords. Behind the tables the wall is dressed stone, with copper and earthenware set along a shelf.

The floor is patterned cement tile in grey, black and cream, and the tables and chairs are varnished wood. Planting comes right up to the edge of the room, and there is bougainvillea over one corner.

Overhead

The roof

The pitched timber roof of the dining room at Taverna Velco, hung with bunches of dried herbs, strings of seashells and filament bulbs — The dining room roof, Taverna Velco

Underfoot

Tables, and the tile

Outside

Potam, at the end of the day

The sun dropping behind a wooded headland to the west-north-west, seen across the water on the Himarë shore — Sundown behind the headland, Potam

Down at the beach, a few minutes' walk from the table, the sun drops straight into the Ionian for most of the year. From early May to early August it goes down behind the land at the north-west end of the bay instead.