On Paxos we call it Kaloiri, and it is the only natural spring with running water on Antipaxos. It lies on the western side of the island, below Stavrou, in a valley of vineyards that runs down to the cove.

There is not much water, but it runs. On an island of limestone, where the rain is lost inside the rock and everyone lived from cisterns, that was enough to make Kaloiri the most precious spot on Antipaxos. From here water was carried by animals to the houses and the vineyards.

The cistern was built by the British, in the years of the Protectorate. The inscription on it survives: built in the year 1833, Lord Nugent, Lord High Commissioner. Lord Nugent was High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands from 1832 to 1835. The building has two vaults, a flat roof of stone slabs and two recesses in the parapet, to make drawing the water easier.

Archduke Ludwig Salvator, who came this way in the 1880s, describes it much as you see it today. The water ran from two large round arches, where maidenhair fern grew, into a basin. The overflow went down into the valley, where the oxen came to drink, each with a heavy bell hung from a wooden collar. He also notes something that struck him as rare for the place: iron pipes that led the water lower down, towards the sea. It is said that the ships of the British navy took on water from the cove as well.

At the edge of the cove, at Alykes, the women of the island made salt in the natural hollows of the rock. A little further on opens the Grava of Kaloiri, the largest sea cave on Antipaxos, which you enter by boat.

You reach the cistern on foot from Stavrou, down a path with steps. The cisterns of Paxos and Antipaxos have been listed monuments since 1982.