What to do
in Naxos.

Twenty minutes inland from the coast and everything changes. The Tragaea plateau is covered in ancient olive groves, and in the middle of it are two villages that have barely changed in three centuries. Halki is the smaller one - Venetian tower houses, a century-old distillery making Kitron from citron leaves, and a handful of ceramics studios where the person behind the counter made the piece you are looking at that same morning.

Apiranthos sits higher up at 600 metres. Its streets, walls, and doorsteps are paved entirely in white marble quarried from the mountain the village sits on. The main square has a kafeneion where old men play tavli and nobody is looking at their phone. This is the point of coming.

Plaka is the beach Naxos locals recommend when they trust you enough to give away their favourite. Not the most fashionable, not the closest. Just three kilometres of fine white sand, water so clear you can read through it, and a handful of tavernas that have been here long enough to know what they are doing. The beach faces west - the afternoon light is extraordinary, and the sunsets are worth staying for.

The island's mythological spine runs through the agricultural plain west of the mountains. The tour starts at the oldest olive press on Naxos - now a working museum with 15 oil tastings - then visits the sanctuary where Dionysus was said to have been born, active as a place of worship since the 14th century BC. In a shaded garden a 2,700-year-old marble giant lies exactly where the quarrymen left him when his foot broke during transport. The road winds back through one of the oldest churches in Europe before returning through Halki.

Most visitors move through Naxos Town as transit - arriving at the port, glancing at the Portara, heading to their accommodation. The town rewards those who stop. The Kastro, the Venetian fortified town within the town, is a warren of marble lanes and tower houses built by the de Sanudo dynasty in the 13th century. Inside the walls there are three museums, a Capuchin convent, and a Catholic cathedral - all within ten minutes' walk of each other, all free or nearly free to enter.