Parga sits seventeen nautical miles east of Corfu across the narrow Ionian strait, a pastel-washed town wedged between limestone headlands and Venetian ramparts that held off the Ottomans for three centuries. The crossing from Kerkyra Port takes ninety minutes on the morning ferry and half that on a fast cruiser, depositing arrivals onto a crescent of sand beneath the Castello, a fortress built in the fifteenth century and sold to Ali Pasha in 1819 before British forces razed its guns. The town sprawls below in tiers of ochre and terracotta, bougainvillea spilling over wrought-iron balconies, fish tavernas lining the quay where caïques unload red mullet and octopus each dawn. The corfu to parga day trip market expanded in the late 1990s when hydrofoils began linking the two ports, though most visitors now arrive via organised boat cruises that weave a route through Sivota's fjord-like inlets and the offshore islets of Paxos and Antipaxos. Sivota—sometimes rendered Syvota—lies eight miles south of Parga, a village of sixty permanent residents clustered around a deep-water harbour edged by pine forest and accessible only by sea or a winding mountain road. The Blue Lagoon, a sheltered bay on Sivota's western flank, takes its name from the cyan refraction of sunlight through ten metres of gin-clear water over white sand, a phenomenon replicated in the sea caves of Paxos where the ceiling apertures throw columns of aquamarine light onto submerged rock. Paxos and Antipaxos float seven miles offshore, the former blanketed in ancient olive groves, the latter a scrub-covered ridge punctuated by Voutoumi Beach, a strip of crushed shell and turquoise shallows frequently cited in Ionian travel literature. The Blue Caves—Ipapanti being the largest—perforate the western cliffs of Paxos, accessible only by inflatable tender or kayak when the Ionian swell permits. Day cruises from Corfu typically bundle Parga, Sivota and either the Paxos circuit or a direct run to the Blue Lagoon, with swim stops timed to the midday sun and a lunch mooring in Parga's harbour. The Castello remains the town's navigational landmark, visible from twelve miles at sea, its crenellated walls now empty save for a Greek flag and the foundations of a ruined church.