Naxos Town, from the Portara to the Kastro

Chora has been the heart of Naxos for more than 5,000 years. Under the cathedral square, near the beach of Grotta, archaeologists found the remains of a Mycenaean town, and the island's Cycladic past fills the Archaeological Museum at the top of the hill. On the little islet of Palatia, at the harbour mouth, the tyrant Lygdamis began a huge marble temple to Apollo around 530 BC. It was never finished, but its great doorway, the Portara, still stands, about 6 m high, framing the sea.

Myth puts the islet at the start of a love story. It was here, they say, that Theseus left Ariadne asleep on his way home from Crete, after she helped him escape the Labyrinth. She woke alone on the shore, and the god Dionysus found her and made her his wife.

In 1207 the Venetian Marco Sanudo took Naxos and made it the capital of the Duchy of the Archipelago, which ruled much of the Cyclades for more than 350 years. He built the Kastro on the hilltop, a ring of houses whose outer walls formed the fortifications, with only a few gates. Catholic families still live there, behind doorways carved with their coats of arms, around the Catholic cathedral and the old Ursuline convent. The French school of the Holy Cross, where the young Nikos Kazantzakis studied, stands in the Kastro too.

Below the walls, the Greek town grew in the lanes of Bourgos, a tangle of white arches, stairs and little churches that runs down to the harbour. In the evening the waterfront fills with people, the ferries come and go, and everyone walks out along the causeway to the Portara to watch the sun go down behind Paros.