☰Hersonissos

Hersonissos is one of the loudest party towns in Greece in high season. The main strip — Eleftheriou Venizelou — runs for the better part of a kilometre and is wall-to-wall bars, clubs, karaoke pubs, and cocktail terraces from about ten in the evening until dawn. Status, New York Beach Bar, Sticky Fingers, Hard Rock Cafe and Camelot are perennial landmarks; cover charges are usually low or absent and drink prices vary wildly between happy hour and the small hours, so look around. For quieter places, head up to Piskopiano or Koutouloufari, where a couple of converted village houses pour decent raki and good local wine to a much older crowd.

Hersonissos's beaches are organised, sandy or pebble-and-sand, and almost entirely lined with sunbeds and umbrellas behind a wall of beach bars. The main town beach is fine for a quick swim but rarely tranquil; Star Beach to the east is the busiest, with watersports and a constant DJ; the cleaner, calmer stretches are at Anissaras to the west, towards Analipsi, where a handful of small coves shelter behind low rocky headlands. Stalida and Malia beaches, ten and fifteen minutes east, are long stretches of soft sand and worth the drive. For wilder swimming, the small bay at Sissi (twenty minutes east) is much quieter and the water is exceptionally clear.

Hersonissos's real strength is as a base. Knossos and the archaeological museum in Iraklion are 30 minutes west on the highway; the Lasithi plateau and the Dictaean Cave climb up into the mountains an hour south; the Venetian harbour at Agios Nikolaos and the leper-colony island of Spinalonga are an hour east; the Minoan palace at Malia is fifteen minutes along the coast. Almost every hotel can arrange a day-tour bus to any of these, but with a rental car the same loops are cheaper and more flexible. A useful counter-trip is a day inland to the village of Krasi, a short drive south, for its giant 2,000-year-old plane tree and a long lunch under the leaves.

The beach strip is mostly indifferent international food at tourist prices — pizza, pasta, English breakfasts, generic "Mediterranean" buffets. Skip it. The good eating in Hersonissos is in two places: the fish tavernas along the working harbour, where you can pick from the day's catch on ice and pay for it by weight, and the hill villages of Piskopiano, Koutouloufari and Old Hersonissos, where shaded courtyards under bougainvillea serve grilled lamb chops, slow-cooked goat, fresh salads, and good house wine for half the price of the same meal on the beach. Order Cretan specialities — dakos, gamopilafo, antikristo lamb, raki to finish — and you will eat well.

Hersonissos is long and narrow — strung out along the coast road for two or three kilometres — and almost everywhere in town is walkable along the seafront, if not always pleasantly. A small tourist train and a fleet of tuk-tuks shuttle between the strip, the harbour, and the hill villages of Piskopiano and Koutouloufari from morning until late evening for a few euros a ride.

Local KTEL buses run east to Stalida and Malia and west to Iraklion at regular intervals from the main bus stop on the highway. A scooter or small rental car opens up the rest of the area — Lasithi, Lyttos, the inland villages — and parking even in high season is generally easy at the western edge of town.

Iraklion International Airport (HER) sits 22 km west of Hersonissos and is the most convenient gateway by far — a 25-minute transfer by taxi or shuttle bus down the new northern coast highway. Charter flights from across northern Europe land all summer; year-round there are direct services from Athens, Thessaloniki and several European hubs.

Frequent KTEL buses run between Iraklion bus station B and Hersonissos every 30 minutes during the day and take about 45 minutes via the coast road. For travellers arriving by ferry from Athens (Piraeus) or from the Cyclades, the port is on the western edge of Iraklion city, a short taxi ride to the bus station.

In Hersonissos itself the catalogue is honest: a small but real archaeological site on the harbour, a couple of water-based attractions for families, the working old fishing port, and the hill villages of Piskopiano and Koutouloufari just inland where you can still hear Greek being spoken. Almost everything else worth seeing on Crete — Knossos, Lasithi, Spinalonga, the eastern beaches — is within a day's drive on the new northern coast highway, and most travellers based in Hersonissos use it as a launchpad for exactly those trips.