Rethymno

Rethymno is the most walkable of the Cretan towns and the right base for two nights between Chania and Heraklion. You can cross the old quarter on foot in 15 minutes. Its Venetian and Ottoman layers mix within a few blocks, and the long sandy beach starts where the old town ends. It is also the calmest of the three Cretan capitals: the harbour is too small for cruise ships, and the pace is set by the local university rather than by mass tourism.

The Fortezza, the largest Venetian fortress on Crete, was built in the 1570s on a rock above the sea and the old town, after two Ottoman attacks. A walk around the ramparts takes a good hour. It is worth the climb in the late afternoon, when the light falls on the eastern walls. Below, the Rimondi Fountain, dated 1626, still pours from three lion-headed spouts into a small triangular square. The Neratze was a Venetian church, became the central mosque under Ottoman rule and is now a music conservatory. Its minaret, the only intact one left in the city, stands over the lower town.

The Arkadi monastery, 20 kilometres south-east of the town, holds the central memory of Cretan resistance. In November 1866, during the uprising against Ottoman rule, around 1,000 villagers and fighters had taken refuge in the monastery. Rather than surrender, they set off the powder magazine. The explosion shocked Europe and put Cretan independence on the international agenda. The site is open to visitors, and its small museum is one of the more affecting on the island.

Stay in the old town, within walking distance of the Fortezza. Eat at the small tavernas in the back lanes rather than on the harbour or the beachfront. Allow two nights, or three if you also want to drive south to Plakias and the beaches on the Libyan Sea.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Rethymno has no airfield of its own. Chania (CHQ) lies roughly 70 kilometres west and Heraklion (HER) 80 kilometres east, each a little over an hour by car. Helistar and Ariston Aviation both fly the Athens to Crete route by helicopter in around 90 minutes, landing on the island for the road to the town.

  2. The address

    Avli, in the old town at Xanthoudidou 22 and Radamanthios, is the address: a cluster of renovated 16th-century Venetian houses around a single courtyard, with ten suites, a restaurant, a wine cellar and a shop of traditional products. Katerina Xekalou established it in 1987 and in effect founded the modern Cretan style of hospitality. Ask for the upper-floor suites, with their rooftop terrace and view of the Fortezza, the town’s Venetian castle.

  3. Veneto

    Veneto has 12 suites inside a 15th-century Venetian mansion, once a Dominican monastery, at 2 to 4 Epimenidou Street, a few lanes back from the old harbour. The restaurant is open from May to October. Meat comes from nearby farms and fish from the Cretan sea, in dishes built on recipes centuries older than the chain hotels on the beachfront.

  4. Vidiano

    Klados Winery, on the coast road east of the town toward Panormo, was founded in 1997 by Emmanuel Klados, a chemist and oenologist, and passed to his son Stelios in 2014. The estate vineyard has been certified organic since 2013, and Vidiano, the native white grape that Cretan growers regard as the island’s flagship, is the one to follow here. Tastings of six or eight wines are by arrangement, and production runs to around 100,000 litres a year.

  5. Preveli

    After the Allied surrender on Crete in early June 1941, the Holy Monastery of Preveli, above the south coast, sheltered British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers cut off in the mountains. Abbot Agathangelos Lagouvardos organised the evacuations, and a group of Australian soldiers were lifted by submarine off the beach below; the Germans later destroyed the Lower Monastery in retaliation. The site is open, and a small museum holds the documents.

  6. The palm forest

    Below the monastery, the Megalopotamos river runs through Kourtaliotis Gorge to the sea, and the bank between gorge and beach carries a stand of several hundred Cretan date palms, Phoenix theophrasti; a fire in 2010 took much of the canopy, and the grove has regenerated. Small boats run to the beach from Plakias through the season, or a footpath leads down from Drimiskiano Amoudi. The beach has no facilities and no umbrellas, and the bay is protected.

  7. Anogeia

    Anogeia, at 750 metres on the northern slopes of Psiloritis, was razed on 13 August 1944 on the order of Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, in reprisal for the village’s role in sheltering the resistance fighters who had kidnapped General Kreipe. Of 940 houses, none stood intact when the looting ended in early September. The village rebuilt and became the centre of the tradition of the Cretan lyra, a bowed string instrument; the Nikos Xylouris house on the main square, kept by his sister Zouboulia, is the one to ask after.

  8. Margarites

    Margarites, in the Mylopotamos hills south-east of the town, is the pottery village of Crete, with 20 active workshops within a few lanes. Giorgis Dalamvelas, born in the village in 1972, and his partner Mariniki Mania set up Keramion in 1997 in an old stone building near the square. They work the local clay with natural pigments from the mountains, polish it with pebbles and decorate it with a sheep’s-wool brush, and the pieces can be shipped.

  9. Argyroupoli

    Argyroupoli lies 27 kilometres south-west, on the site of ancient Lappa, where ten springs surface together under plane trees and supply some of Rethymno’s drinking water. In the lower village, Palios Mylos, built around the stones of an old watermill, is the taverna to choose, for trout raised in the spring channels and antikristo lamb cooked on the spit. Above the springs, the limestone tombs of the ancient cemetery lie in the rock under the great plane tree.

  10. The window

    September is the month: the meltemi, the strong summer wind, softens, the sea holds at 24 to 26 degrees, the package-holiday weeks ebb from the seafront, and the south-coast roads to Plakias and Preveli empty. The Fortezza, the largest Venetian castle of its kind, raised between 1573 and 1580 to Sforza Pallavicini’s bastioned plan above the old town, is best walked at the cooler end of the month, when the ramparts and the lanes below them have cleared of the high-summer crowd.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The Venetian Harbour

    The old Venetian harbour of Rethymno is a small, almost round basin with a little lighthouse at its mouth, below the Fortezza, the citadel the Venetians built on the Paleokastro hill and one of the best-preserved castles in Crete. The old port takes fishing boats and a tender (a yacht’s small boat), no more, so the yachts lie at the marina east of the old town. A yacht’s tender comes in for the harbour-side tavernas under the walls.

  2. Plakias

    Plakias is on the south coast, 21 kilometres below Rethymno. The resort grew from a fishing jetty on the alluvial fan, the spread of soil and stone that the Kotsifou gorge has washed down to the Libyan Sea, with mountains behind and a long gold beach along the bay. A yacht lies off the beach, with the gorge road climbing behind the town into the interior.

  3. Agia Galini

    Agia Galini is at the far southeast of the Rethymno coast, built like an amphitheatre up a rocky point above the Libyan Sea. A fishing village that became a resort, it was Soulia in antiquity, the port of the inland city of Syvritos. A yacht lies off the harbour, 55 kilometres by mountain road from Rethymno, the town it belongs to.

  4. Bali

    Bali is on the north coast east of Rethymno, toward Heraklion: a fishing village that grew into a resort around a string of small coves. It stands on the site of ancient Astale, the harbour of the mountain city of Axos. A yacht lies in one of the little bays, where wellness hotels now step down to the water where the caïques (traditional wooden boats) once drew up, and the beaches are small and the water clear.

Mythology

  1. Mount Ida

    Crete’s Mount Ida rises over the cave and ridges that Diodorus says were made sacred to the infant Zeus. Ancient accounts also place the Idaean Dactyls here, although some said they first belonged to the other Mount Ida, in Phrygia.

  2. The Idaean Cave

    Diodorus Siculus places the hiding and rearing of the infant Zeus at Ide, in a cave near Mount Ida, in the care of the Curetes and the Nymphs who lived on the mountain. This gives the cave its own claim on the birth story, apart from the Dictaean cave above Psychro, and its shields and bronze tympanon are now in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion.