The second port of Samos, on the north-west coast, has a more workaday feel than Vathy or Pythagoreio — it grew rich in the nineteenth century on tanning leather and exporting Samian wine, and the abandoned warehouses and factory shells still stand around the harbour as a kind of industrial archaeology.
A university campus has injected a younger crowd, but Karlovasi is still mostly visited as the jumping-off point for the western mountains and the waterfalls at Potami a short drive away. The old upper town (Ano Karlovasi) is worth a wander for the late nineteenth-century mansions and the great views back over the Aegean.