Athens - With its beautiful beaches, quaint fishing villages and historical sites such as the Cave of Apocalyse where Saint John is said to have received his revelation, the island of Patmos has long been a popular tourist destination.

But recently the tiny Aegean island has drawn a new type of visitor to its sandy shores - a visitor island residents insist they can do without.

Municipal authorities on the island have said they will block their ports to would-be immigrants arriving from neighboring Turkey, arguing that the unwanted visitors have exceeded the number of permanent residents on the island.

A total of 3,931 illegal immigrants have arrived on the island so far this year, many being transferred from the nearby Greek islet of Agathonisi, where they had been abandoned by smugglers.

Authorities on Agathonisi, which has only 150 residents and lies 8 nautical miles off the Turkish coast, have also had enough.

"We are not going to take them in anymore," community leader Evangelos Kottoros told Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa).

"We do not have the proper health facilities or economic means to handle so many people," he said.

Kottoros said the immense problem has been temporarily solved over the past few weeks after the Merchant Marine Ministry sent three additional coast guard boats to patrol the sea area between Greece and Turkey.

"It has been our experience that when the Aegean Sea dividing Greece and Turkey is properly patrolled then nothing comes through," he said, adding that he did not "know how long the extra reinforcements would be made available to the island."

Meanwhile on the island of Samos, where one of Greece's three main migrant detention centres is located - authorities have appealed to the government for help to curb the relentless tide of illegal immigrants arriving on the island.

Samos authorities claim the number of migrants in the local reception centre has recently risen to 500, nearly double its capacity.

"The centre is dangerously overcrowded. The local community on Samos cannot bear the burden of guarding the country's sea border on its own," Samos Prefect Manolis Karlas said.

The new migrant dentention center opened earlier this year, replacing an old building which the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner described as "horrendous," ordering its immediate closure.

Local authorities fear that unless immediate measures are taken to curb the number of immigrants arriving on the island, the overcrowding will continue until the new centre resembles the old one.

The UN refugee agency and the French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have repeatedly criticized the detention conditions in Greece, like the one on the island of Lesvos, saying they continue to fall short of international and European standards.

Greece's biggest increase in illegal traffic has been through its sea borders with Turkey.

Officials on Samos, Lesvos and Patmos have been besieged with almost daily boatloads of migrants with the largest influx of illegal immigrants being Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians. Arrivals from Africa, mainly Somalia are increasing - a sign that routes to Italy and Spain are proving more arduous.

Many are reported to be thrown overboard in the dangerous Aegean waters by human traffickers evading coast guard police, with hundreds drowning every year.

Athens has called on the European Union to establish a coastguard to halt the flood of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the 27- member bloc by sea.

Greece is faced with monitoring 16,000 kilometers of coastline, the largest external sea border of any EU member state.

The government also announced last month the creation of new reception centres and called for increased funding from Brussels.

Last year Greece received 112,000 would-be immigrants, according to statistics from the Interior Ministry.

Some end up staying in Greece while many more migrants continue their journey westward. Detentions at the port of Patras, Greece's main gateway to western Europe, have more than doubled this year.

"We must do all we can to curb the phenomenon of illegal immigration by helping migrants countries of origin and their residents," Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos said.

However, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said that asylum seekers face "undue hardships" in Greece, often lacking legal aid to ensure that their claims receive adequate scrutiny from the asylum authorities.

The refugee agency has described Greece's recognition rate for refugees as "disturbingly low." The overall protection rate for refugees of all nationalities in 2006 was 1 per cent in Greece, compared to 45 per cent in Italy and 50 per cent in Sweden.

Greece routinely arrests all illegal immigrants and asylum seekers found in its territory and detains them in reception centers for up to three months. (dpa)