Naxos map: where the beaches, the Chora and the villages are

The island

One coast for swimming, one mountain for everything else

Naxos covers 430 square kilometres, more than Paros and Mykonos put together, and the shape of it does something no other Cycladic island does. The west side is flat: a coastal plain of potato fields and olive groves with 20 kilometres of sand along its edge, and every beach on that edge is a straight run south from the town on one good road.

Then the ground stands up. Mount Zas reaches 1,004 metres, the highest point in the Cyclades by a clear margin, and the range it belongs to runs north-east across the whole island. Every village of the interior is stacked on the flanks of it, and the road that links them climbs from sea level to 600 metres in about 20 kilometres. That climb is why Apiranthos is 45 minutes from a beach it can see.

East of the ridge the island effectively stops being developed. One road drops to Moutsouna, the old port that shipped emery down a cable railway from the mines above it, and another runs south to Panormos on a surface that gives up before the end. There are no hotels worth the word out there, no bus that helps, and that is exactly why the two bays are empty in August.

How long everything actually takes

Kilometres mislead on an island where half the roads are switchbacks, so the table leads with time. These are drives outside July and August, when the coast road south fills up and the climb to Apiranthos queues behind whatever coach went up first.

The pair of rows that catches people out is Plaka to Apiranthos. Thirty-two kilometres, 50 minutes, and it is the journey between the two halves of the island that every itinerary underestimates. Book a room on the sand and plan a village day, and that drive is the whole morning gone in each direction.

Naxos Chora, and why the port matters here

Naxos has one ferry berth and it is on the town seafront. That single fact separates this island from the two it is usually compared to. On Santorini the boats tie up at Athinios, a concrete shelf under the caldera with a hairpin road above it. On Mykonos the New Port is a bus ride from anywhere you would sleep. Here the ramp comes down onto a quay with tavernas on it, the old town is directly behind, and the island bus terminal is 40 metres along the same waterfront.

The old town is two layers. The Bourgos is the lower one, a warren of lanes flagged in white stone between whitewashed walls, with carved marble doorframes reused from older buildings set into houses that are still lived in. Above it the Kastro is what the Venetians walled off in the thirteenth century, and a handful of the families who built it still have names on the doors.

The west coast beaches, in the order you reach them

They come in a line going south, and the rule is simple: the further you go, the emptier it gets and the more you need a car. Agios Georgios is the town beach, shallow and busy and a walk from the old town. Agios Prokopios starts the proper sand ten minutes out and takes the most buses. Agia Anna is the same strand a few hundred metres on, with a small fishing quay at the end of it.

Plaka is where it changes. Four kilometres of sand backed by dune and bamboo, organised at the northern end and bare at the southern, and 20 minutes from the port. Mikri Vigla is a headland with a bay on each side, and the two behave differently: the north bay catches the meltemi and is full of kites and boards from July, the south one is sheltered enough to swim in on the same afternoon. Past there, Kastraki and then Alyko, where a juniper forest grows down onto ochre sandstone and nothing is organised at all.

The far end of the run

Halki, Filoti and Apiranthos, and the road that links them

One road goes into the middle of Naxos and it is the reason to hire a car. It leaves the Chora through Sangri, where the temple of Demeter stands in a field ten minutes off the tarmac, and drops into the Tragea, a valley of olive terraces and Byzantine chapels that is greener than anything else in the Cyclades. Halki sits in the middle of it, 25 minutes from the port: the old capital of the island, with a citron distillery that has been open since 1896 and three cafés around a square.

Filoti is the next one up, the largest village on Naxos, spread across the shoulder of Zas where the climb begins. The path to the summit starts above it, and so does the serious part of the road. Apiranthos is 10 kilometres and 20 minutes further on for a reason: the tarmac hairpins the whole way. What is at the top is a village of marble, the lanes paved in it and the houses built from it, settled by Cretans who came over in the seventeenth century and still speaking with the accent.

Beyond Apiranthos the road drops to Koronos, stacked up both walls of a ravine, and then runs down to Apollonas at the northern tip, where a ten metre kouros lies unfinished in an old quarry above the village. That is 48 kilometres from the Chora and an hour and a quarter, and going back along the north coast instead of retracing your steps makes the whole thing a loop rather than an out and back.

Bus or car, and where the line falls

Naxos has one of the better bus networks in the Cyclades and it still only solves half the island. Everything on the west coast strip is well served: Agios Prokopios, Agia Anna and Plaka get a departure every half hour or so through the summer from the terminal on the quay, and the fare is a couple of euros. The interior is a different service. Halki, Filoti and Apiranthos get a handful of runs a day, timed for a resident going to town, and Moutsouna and Panormos are effectively off the network.

So the line is clear. A week spent swimming works without a car, and a room in the Chora or on the beach strip makes that easy. A week that includes the mountains does not. The third option, in fairness, is to hire something for two days out of seven and take the bus the rest of the week. That is what a lot of people on this island end up doing.

Getting here, and Paros across the strait

Everything arrives at the same quay. From Piraeus it is three and a half hours on a fast boat and five on a conventional Blue Star, and the slower one is the more comfortable of the two in a swell. There is also a runway three kilometres south of the town taking propeller flights from Athens, which is useful for a connection and useless for luggage.

Paros is 45 minutes west and it is the obvious second island. The two face each other across a strait, the boats run several times a day all year, and the pair works because they are not the same trip: Paros has Naoussa and the better evening, Naxos has the longer beaches and the lower bill. If Athens is the start of the route, the crossing to Parikia takes roughly the same time as the one here, so which island you land on first is a question of timetable rather than geography.

North of here Mykonos is 40 minutes to an hour, which makes the fly in and fly out pair straightforward. South, Ios is about an hour and Santorini roughly two on a high-speed boat. The Small Cyclades sit off the south-east corner, and Koufonisia is between one and two hours depending on which boat you take. Look at the way the whole group connects before you commit to a route. The lines run west to east, and a plan that fights them costs days.