Chania, and the mountains that close off Crete's west

Crete does not behave like most Greek islands. It is long enough to have regional accents, a mountain spine tall enough to hold snow into late spring, and a history that runs back further than the rest of the Aegean, to a Bronze Age civilisation that had plumbing before most of Europe had cities. Its western end, around Chania, keeps some distance from all of that: a harbour town with its own layered past, backed by the White Mountains, which close off the interior almost as effectively as the sea closes off the coast.

A harbour built by three empires

Chania's old harbour is the first thing most visitors photograph, and it earns the attention. The Venetians built the arsenal and much of the fortified waterfront in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Crete was one of Venice's most valuable overseas territories; the lighthouse at the harbour mouth, though it looks Venetian at a glance, was rebuilt in its current form during the Ottoman period that followed, in a style borrowed from Egyptian minarets. Walk the old town behind the harbour and the layering continues: mosques converted to other uses, a covered market on the site of the old walls, and streets narrow enough that the sea breeze rarely quite reaches them.

Inland a short way, the ruins at Aptera occupy a plateau with views back down to the Souda Bay, one of the finest natural harbours in the Mediterranean and the reason a Greco-Roman city grew up here in the first place. It is a quieter, less visited site than Knossos, and mostly for that reason a more atmospheric one.

The plateau behind the peaks

South of Chania, the road climbs into the White Mountains, Crete's highest range, and arrives eventually at Omalos, an upland plain ringed by peaks that still carry snow well into the walking season. It is the gateway to the Samaria Gorge, one of the longest in Europe, and even for travellers not walking the gorge itself, the plateau is worth the climb: a green, high-altitude basin that feels like a different island from the beaches an hour's drive below it.

Villages along the way keep their own pace, and the botanical gardens near Chania, planted on what was once burned-out farmland after a wildfire, are a smaller, gentler version of the same idea: what grows back, deliberately, when the mountains and the climate are respected rather than fought.

An olive tree, and a labyrinth

Two stops further east reach further back in time. At Vouves stands an olive tree said to be among the oldest in the world, still producing fruit from a trunk so gnarled and hollowed by age that it has become a monument in its own right, regardless of exactly how many centuries it has managed. And at Knossos, outside Heraklion, the ruins of the largest Bronze Age palace on Crete sprawl across a low hill, the legendary seat of King Minos and the labyrinth of Greek myth. The site was excavated and partly reconstructed in the early twentieth century by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, whose interpretations remain debated, but whose work is the reason anyone can walk through a throne room nearly four thousand years old at all.

Crete by land, and Crete from the water

A tour built around Chania and the White Mountains moves at walking pace, with Heraklion and Knossos as a coda at the end. A different way to meet the same island is from the sea, as one stop on a cruise through the Greek islands and the Turkish Riviera, which calls at Crete alongside Rhodes and the Turkish resort coast further east. The two approaches suit different trips rather than competing with each other: one is a week entirely given over to Crete's western half, the other a single, well-placed call on a longer itinerary. Either way, the mountains behind Chania are the detail that separates this end of the island from the postcard version of Crete, and they are not the sort of thing you see properly from a beach towel.