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Limnos is a sizeable agricultural and garrison island whose remoteness and peculiar ferry schedules have until recently protected it from the worst excesses of the holiday trade. Most summer visitors are Greek, particularly from Thessaloniki, though the locals are becoming increasingly used to numbers of German and British visitors. Accommodation tends to be comfortable if a bit overpriced, with a strong bias towards self-catering units, and backpackers are explicitly discouraged . The bucolic island has been getting trendy of late: there are upscale souvenir shops, village houses restored by Thessalonians as weekend retreats, some sort of noon-to-small-hours musical bar at every beach, and a fairly significant gay scene. Limnos's traditional role is as an army posting. Its military presence ran to 25,000 soldiers at the nadir of Greco-Turkish relations in the late 1980s, though it is now down to about 10,000; conventional tourism was slow in coming because the islanders made a reliable living off the soldiers and family members coming to visit them. Since the 1960s, the island has been the focus of periodic disputes between the Greek and Turkish governments; Turkey has a long-standing demand that Limnos should be demilitarized, and Turkish aircraft regularly intrude Greek air space overhead, prompting immediate responses from the Greek Air Force squadron here. The bays of Bournia and Moudhros , the latter one of the largest natural harbours in the Aegean, almost divide Limnos in two. The west of the island is dramatically bare and hilly, with abundant basalt put to good use as street cobbles and house masonry. Like most volcanic islands, Limnos produces excellent wine from westerly vineyards - good dry whites, roses and excellent retsina - plus ouzo at Kondias. The east is low-lying and speckled with marshes popular with duck-hunters, where it's not occupied by cattle, combine harvesters and vast corn fields. Despite off-islander slander to that effect, Limnos is not flat, barren or treeless; much of the countryside consists of rolling hills, well vegetated except on their heights, and with substantial clumps of almond, jujube, myrtle, oak, poplar and mulberry trees. The island is, however, extremely dry, with irrigation water pumped from deep wells, and a limited number of potable springs. Yet various terrapin-haunted creeks bring sand to several long, sandy beaches around the coast, where it's easy to find a stretch to yourself - though there's no escaping the stingless jellyfish which occasionally pour out of the Dardanelles and die here in the shallows (they've fortunately decreased in recent years). On the plus side, beaches shelve gently, making them ideal for children and quick to warm up in early summer, with no cool currents except near the river mouths.
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