A Travel Blog
We spent a month in Athens, Delphi and Crete in early 2020.
After a week in Naxos, we came to like the town and the island quite a bit. It’s a comfortable size, with beautiful scenery and architecture, welcoming people, and good food. It’s an easy place to visit and spend some time. We walked the long way back after dinner on our last night and were treated to some photogenic skies.
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We wanted to see the interior of Naxos beyond the main port town, and luckily the island has an excellent public bus service that operates under the KTEL umbrella, like the buses we took in Crete a few years ago. We had our choice of pretty mountain towns to visit — Chalki and Filoti almost made the cut — but we settled on Apeiranthos.
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We took a one-day cruise from Naxos specifically to visit the island of Delos, but the itinerary also took us to the nearby island of Mykonos for a few hours. We never planned to visit Mykonos, but this short stop was a chance to glimpse another side of Greece.
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The Greek island of Delos sits at the center of the Cyclades. The island held great importance to both the Ancient Greeks (as religious center) and the Romans (as a commercial port). Today the island is an uninhabited archaeological site that can only be visited during limited hours. Staying overnight or swimming on Delos is forbidden.
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The port area of Naxos Town is where nearly everyone arrives or departs the island by water. The very large ferries run regularly, and there’s a vibrant strip of restaurants, cafes and bars ready to serve them.
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There are too many interesting sights around Naxos Town to fit into one post, so here are some more views and details we’ve stumbled across since this previous post.
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Naxos Town (also known as simply Chora) is the main city on the island of Naxos, as well as the ferry port. Naxos is a hub for the Cycladic island ferries, and the enormous ships are arriving and departing many times each day, with streams of people, vehicles and cargo embarking and disembarking every hour or two.
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On a rocky peninsula beside the main ferry port in Naxos are the remains of the Temple of Apollo, also known as the Portara, due to the door-like shape of the few stones left standing.
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After our stay on tiny Astypalea, we took an early-morning ferry to the island of Naxos, the largest island in the Cyclades group. We are staying in Naxos Town (Chora) where there’s a lively port area with many restaurants and bars, as well as a fascinating labyrinth of streets that lead up to a Venetian castle.
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On our last full day on Astypalea we were fortunate to catch one of the first Avra island tours of the season. This daylong cruise in a wooden boat took us to some of the tiny unpopulated islands we’d been glimpsing off the coast of Astypalea during our stay.
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Apanemiá is a small kafenio hidden in the backstreets of the Chora at the base of the Astypalea castle. They have very nice tables tucked around the surrounding laneways, but on the windy night we visited we chose to sit inside.
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We’ve returned to the streets around the castle a few times now, wandering at different times of day and in different lighting, and the urge to take a photos is impossible to resist.
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