Chora, the village the pirates could not see

For most of its history the people of Samothraki lived away from the sea. The coast belonged to pirates and raiders, so the islanders built their main village high in a hollow on the western slopes of Mount Saos, where it is invisible from the water until you are almost on top of it. That village is Chora, and it was the capital of the island until the port of Kamariotissa grew in the 20th century.

The houses are built in the way of northern Greece rather than the Cyclades: grey stone walls, wooden balconies, small windows and roofs of red tile, packed tightly together up the slope so that one family's terrace is often the next one's roof. The lanes between them are steep and cobbled, with gutters running down the middle for the winter rain, and there are fountains of mountain water at the corners.

On the rock at the top stands the castle. Its towers were built in the 1430s by the Gattilusi, the Genoese family who ruled Lesbos and, for about a century, Samothraki and other islands of the northern Aegean, and you can still find their coat of arms on the walls. Little is left inside, but the walk up through the village is lovely, and the walls look out over the roofs, the olive groves and the sea, towards the mainland on a clear evening.

Below the castle, next to the church of the Dormition of the Virgin, a 19th-century stone house holds the Folklore Museum: the looms, farm tools and shepherds' gear, the costumes and the rooms of a family home from the days before tourism. It was once the island's first secondary school. Most of what you see was given by the people of the village.

Chora comes alive at night. Visitors who have spent the day at the waterfalls drive up for dinner, the tavernas put out tables on the terraces and in the lanes, and the cafes stay busy late with coffee, cake and drinks. It is the one place on the island that feels like a small town, and it is still very much the islanders' own village.