Naxos: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Chora is read from the water upwards: a marble doorway on an islet, a quay, a covered market lane, and a walled Catholic quarter at the top that held the island for three and a half centuries. The order is not decorative — each layer was built by whoever had just taken the place. Two hours, uphill the whole way, and the lanes are covered so the heat is bearable.

A short history of Naxos

Naxos is the largest island in the Cyclades, and according to mythology it was here that Theseus abandoned Ariadne. Around 530 BC work began on a temple to Apollo at the entrance to the harbour; it was never finished, and only its huge doorway, the Portara, remains. In 1207 the Venetian nobleman Marco Sanudo captured the island and founded the Duchy of the Archipelago, whose capital was here and whose rulers governed the Cyclades for more than three hundred years. In 1566 Sultan Selim II gave the duchy to Joseph Nasi, a Jewish businessman from a family of exiles from Portugal, who received the title Duke of Naxos. The Venetian castle on the hill above the town is still inhabited.

The ten best sights in Naxos

1
Chora
The town climbs from the quay to the castle in a single slope, and the lanes are covered over in places
2
The Portara
A marble doorway from an unfinished temple of Apollo, left standing because the blocks were too big to steal
3
The Kastro
A Venetian walled quarter from 1207, and Catholic families still live inside it eight centuries later
4
Grotta
A Mycenaean settlement lies submerged just off this shore, and on a calm day you can see the walls
5
Old Market Lane
The covered lane through the old town; it was roofed so that it could be defended and it still is
6
Fontana
The high quarter above the market, where the lanes narrow to shoulder width and the tourists stop
7
Apano Kastro
A Venetian castle on a crag in the middle of the island, built as the refuge for when the coast fell
8
Cheimarros Tower
A round marble tower from the fourth century BC, fifteen metres high and built without mortar
9
Mount Zas
The highest point in the Cyclades at 1,004 metres; three hours up from Filoti and no shade at all
10
Zas Cave
The cave where tradition says Zeus was raised, and finds inside it go back to the Neolithic

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A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Naxos:

Free walking tours in Naxos

A door with no temple behind it

The Portara · This is the doorway of a temple of Apollo begun around 530 BC under the tyrant Lygdamis and never finished. Everything else was carried off over the centuries as building material for the town and the castle — the door survived for one reason: its three blocks weigh about twenty tonnes each and nobody could move them. What you are looking at is what was too heavy to steal.
Grotta · Under the water off this shore lies a Mycenaean settlement — walls, floors and graves from about 1300 BC, now a metre or two below the surface. The sea did not rise dramatically; the land sank. On a calm morning you can make out the lines of the walls from the rocks above.
Mitropolis · The Orthodox cathedral stands on a site that has been in continuous use for three thousand years, and the excavation under the square in front of it is open — you can look down through the glass at Mycenaean and Geometric layers. The Orthodox cathedral is here, at the bottom of the town, because the Catholic rulers kept the top of the hill.
The Old Market Lane · The lane is roofed over for most of its length, and that was defence rather than shade: a covered street cannot be seen into from above and can be blocked at both ends. The same roofs are the reason you can walk the old town at two in the afternoon in August.
The Kastro · In 1207 a Venetian named Marco Sanudo took Naxos and declared himself Duke of the Archipelago, and his descendants and their allies ruled these islands from this hill for about three hundred and fifty years. The Kastro was the Catholic quarter and it still is: the families whose names are over the doors — Barozzi, Della Rocca, Sommaripa — have descendants living inside the walls today, and the Catholic community of Naxos has never left.
The Ursuline School · French Ursuline nuns opened a school for girls inside the Kastro in 1739, in a place and a century where female literacy was close to nothing. The Catholic schools of this quarter went on teaching into the twentieth century, and among the boys in the Jesuit school next door, for one year, was Nikos Kazantzakis.

The marble that never left the quarry

Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades and the only one with real water, which made it the rich island — and it also had marble, coarser than Paros’s but plentiful. This route is the inland half: a rebuilt archaic temple, a castle on a crag, a valley of Byzantine churches, and two colossal statues lying in fields where they were abandoned two and a half thousand years ago. A full day, and a car.

Temple of Demeter · A small marble temple from about 530 BC, built entirely of Naxian marble including the roof tiles, which is unusual. It was turned into a Christian church, then into a farm, and its blocks ended up in walls and houses for kilometres around. In the 1990s archaeologists went and collected them back, block by block, and rebuilt a large part of it — so what stands here is the original stone, returned.
Bazeos Tower · A seventeenth-century monastery built as a tower, because a monastery in the Cyclades needed to be defensible first and devotional second. It was bought and restored privately and is now an exhibition and concert space in summer — which is how most of these towers survive at all.
Apano Kastro · Sanudo built this castle on a crag in the middle of the island as the place to retreat to when the coast could not be held, and it worked: the inland villages were never permanently taken. Below it, on the same rock, there are graves from the third millennium BC — people chose this hill for the same reason four thousand years earlier.
Panagia Protothronos · In the middle of Halki, and the frescoes inside are painted in layers on top of each other from the sixth century to the thirteenth. Conservators have exposed windows into the lower layers rather than choosing one, so you see six centuries of painting on the same wall at once.
Vallindras Distillery · Kitron is a liqueur distilled not from the fruit of the citron tree but from its leaves, and it has been made in this house since 1896 in copper stills that are still in use. It comes in three strengths, which are green, clear and yellow, and the colour tells you the alcohol. It is a protected designation and it is made nowhere else.
Flerio · Two unfinished marble kouroi lie on their backs in a garden here, each about five metres long, cut in the sixth century BC and abandoned where they cracked. You can see the chisel marks and the flaw that ended the work. The statues were being made in the quarry, nearly finished, before being shipped — and these two never got out of the field.

The mountain that was a mine

The north-east of Naxos is the emery country, and emery is the reason these villages exist. It is the hardest natural abrasive after diamond, this island was the main source of it in the world, and the state ran it as a monopoly: miners dug it out of galleries by hand, and from 1926 an aerial cableway carried the ore nine kilometres down the mountain to a loading pier. The towers are still standing in the hills with cable hanging off them. A full day, a car, and the road is narrow.

Apeiranthos · The lanes here are paved in marble and the village speaks a dialect the rest of the island notices, because it was settled by Cretans who fled the Ottoman conquest of Crete in the seventeenth century. It has four small museums for a village of a few hundred people, all of them founded by locals, which tells you something about the place.
Agia Kyriaki · A ninth-century chapel below the village whose frescoes have no human figures in them at all — only crosses, birds and geometric patterns. That is because they were painted during the iconoclast period, when images of people were banned in the Byzantine church, and almost nothing from those decades survived anywhere.
Koronos · The village sits on both sides of a ravine like an amphitheatre, and it is here because of the mines above it. The emery miners of Naxos were organised, and in the twentieth century they struck repeatedly against the state monopoly over pay and over the weighing of the ore — this was a mining village in the full sense, on an Aegean island.
Moutsouna · This was the loading port. The ore came down from the mountain in buckets on an aerial cableway, nine kilometres of it, and was tipped into ships from a pier here. The system ran from 1926 until the trade collapsed, and the concrete towers, the station buildings and lengths of the cable are all still in place — nobody dismantled any of it.
Apollonas · A fishing village at the northern tip, and until the coast road was cut it was effectively a separate world — people went to Chora by boat, not by land. The drive here along the north-west coast takes about two hours and it is the reason to come as much as the village is.
Kouros of Apollonas · Ten and a half metres of statue, bearded, lying on its back and still joined to the bedrock it was being carved out of. It was abandoned unfinished in the quarry, and because it is bearded it is probably Dionysus and not Apollo — which matters, because Naxos is the island where Dionysus is said to have found Ariadne after Theseus left her here.

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Getting to Naxos and getting around

Naxos Island National Airport · Three kilometres south of Chora, one short runway, and only small propeller aircraft land here
Naxos Port · Every ferry docks under the Portara, and the fast boat from Athens is about three and a half hours
Bus Station · On the waterfront by the port, and the mountain routes run only a few times a day

Cheap eats in Naxos

Naxos is the one Cycladic island that feeds itself, and that single fact changes the food. It has springs, a valley, pasture and a mountain, so it produces cheese, meat and potatoes rather than importing them — graviera from here has a protected name, and the sharp hard cheese called arseniko is made nowhere else. The going rate on the island for a souvlaki in paper is a few euro, for a plate of the local cheese and bread a little more, and for grilled fish on a quay several times that. These are the places where the produce is, not the places with a view.

The souvlaki lane, Chora · A few euro, standing, and open past midnight
The quay, Chora · Cheese, bread and tomato, bought separately and eaten on the wall
Agia Anna harbour · Fish by the kilo off the boats in the afternoon
Filoti · The village shops sell the cheese the mountain makes
Apeiranthos · The village makes its own raki and sells it from the house
Moutsouna · Two tavernas on the sand and the fish is from that morning
Vallindras, Halki · Three kitron strengths and the tasting is free
Eggares Olive Press · Oil, olives and bread, and they explain the machine

Museums in Naxos

Almost everything worth seeing on Naxos is a building rather than a display case, and four of the five below are houses and towers that were lived in. The exception holds the Cycladic figurines, and they are worth the climb.

Archaeological Museum · In the old Jesuit school at the top of the Kastro
Venetian Museum · The owners give the tour; concerts in the courtyard in summer
Ursuline School · Open as an exhibition space; the building is the exhibit
Glezos Tower · One of the original Kastro towers; the stair is the structure
Bazeos Tower · Summer exhibitions and a festival; closed out of season

Holy places in Naxos

There are said to be around five hundred churches and chapels on Naxos, and a handful of them are among the oldest standing in Greece. The reason is the same reason the island was rich: it had water and food, so people stayed, and nothing was ever abandoned long enough to fall down. Modest dress, and several are opened by a keyholder in the nearest village.

Panagia Drosiani · Below Moni; small fee, and ask in the village if it is shut
Panagia Protothronos · In the middle of Halki; open mornings
Agia Kyriaki · Below Apeiranthos; no figures in the frescoes, and that is the point
Fotodotis · A fortified church above Danakos; a walk, not a drive
Agios Mamas · Alone in a field, and it was the cathedral before the Venetians
Panagia Argokiliotissa · The island’s pilgrimage; impossible to visit quietly at Easter

Nature and day trips near Naxos

Naxos has something no other Cycladic island has, which is water. There are springs, a river bed that runs in winter, terraced valleys that stay green through August and a mountain over a thousand metres high. Everything in this cube follows from that one difference.

Mount Zas · Three hours up from Filoti, no shade, and take two litres
Zas Cave · An hour from the road; a torch, and it is a real cave
Alyko · Protected cedar on dunes; stay on the paths
Keramoti · End of the road; the gorge walk down is marked
Melanes · Springs and gardens, and the kouros lies in one of them
Potamia · Three villages on one stream; water mills along it
Lionas · Pebbles at the mouth of a gorge; the drive is the attraction

Things to do in Naxos with kids

The west coast of Naxos is one long shallow shelf, which is unusual in the Cyclades and is the practical reason families come here rather than to the steeper islands. The wind is the thing to plan around: north of a headland it blows, south of it, it does not.

Agios Prokopios · Ten minutes by bus from town, and shallow a long way out
Plaka · Four kilometres of sand; walk south for the empty part
Kastraki · Almost always empty, and the water stays knee-deep
Agiassos · A wide southern bay with one settlement and no wind
Flerio · A five-metre statue lying in a garden; free, and shaded
The Portara · Five minutes from the port on a causeway; go at sunset

Nightlife in Naxos

Naxos does not have Mykonos’s night and does not try to. The evening is the waterfront between eight and eleven, the bars in the old lanes after that, and one beach bar scene at the kitesurf end of the island. That is the whole map.

The waterfront · Eight to eleven, and it is the whole town walking
Fontana · Bars in the covered lanes above the market; after eleven
Grotta · The sunset side of town, and the rocks are the seating
Mikri Vigla · The kitesurf end; beach bars from the afternoon
Agia Anna · Tavernas on the quay, and quieter than the town
Hawaii Beach · Under the cedars; the local sunset, with no bar at all

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Frequently asked questions about Naxos

What is there to see in Naxos?

The top sights in Naxos are Chora, The Portara and The Kastro. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Naxos?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Naxos without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Naxos?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Naxos, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: A door with no temple behind it.

How do you get to Naxos and get around?

The main ways are Naxos Island National Airport, Naxos Port and Bus Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Naxos, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Naxos that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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