Crete: the top twenty

You approach it by sea, which is the only way, and the walls come up out of the water exactly as they were built to. Inside is a whole abandoned street: houses, a church, a bakery, the tunnel new arrivals were walked through. It was a leper colony until 1957, within living memory, and the island has been left as it was found rather than tidied into a monument, which is what makes it land. Twenty minutes on a boat each way across a turquoise channel, and lunch in Elounda afterwards. Nothing else on this list stays with people the way this does. The ground is uneven and unshaded and you stay until the boat returns, so go early and take it slowly.

A working harbour that happens to be beautiful: painted caiques tied along the quay, a red-domed church behind them, palms, and a line of tavernas where the fish is landed rather than delivered. The bay is shallow and almost still, so the whole place has the calm of somewhere sheltered. This is the lunch everyone remembers, and it is also the jetty for the Spinalonga boats, so the two make one unhurried day. Anyone who would rather not walk the island can sit it out here very happily with a coffee and the view.

The third-largest palace the Minoans built, on flat ground by the sea a few kilometres from the hotel, and almost nobody goes. You can stand in the central court with the mountains behind you and the sea in front and have the place more or less to yourself, which is not a sentence anyone writes about Knossos. It was never reconstructed, so what you are looking at is the actual thing: storerooms with the great jars still in place, and the kernos, a round offering stone with hollows cut around its rim that nobody has convincingly explained. Go at opening time; there is no shade to speak of.

Lake Voulismeni sits in the middle of the town, sixty-odd metres deep, ringed by cafés and joined to the harbour by a short cut channel, so you drink your coffee looking at still green water on one side and fishing boats on the other. It was long held to be bottomless and the stories attached to it have never quite gone away. The town around it is the most walkable on this coast, with a real waterfront rather than a resort strip, and it asks nothing of you: no site, no ticket, no schedule. On the bus line if you would rather not take a taxi.

This is where the Minoans actually are. The frescoes are here, not on the sites: the dolphins, the bull-leapers, the blue monkeys. So are the snake goddesses, the carved stone bulls' heads, the gold bee pendant, and the Phaistos Disc, covered in a stamped script nobody has ever read. It is one of the great collections in Europe, it takes about two hours, and it is the one place where four thousand years of this island stops being ruins and turns into people who made things. Air-conditioned, full of benches, and a short walk from lunch in the old town.

A serious marine research institute that happens to let the public in, and much better than the word "aquarium" prepares you for. Sixty tanks of Mediterranean species, including a big open one where sharks and rays pass at eye level and you end up standing far longer than you planned. It is the same sea you have been swimming in all week, which is the point: you come out recognising things. Cool, level, full of benches, about two hours, and the obvious answer to the windy day at the end of the week.

Mochos sits in a bowl of olive groves and vineyards above Malia: a medieval tangle of lanes opening onto a plane-shaded square where the tavernas put their tables under the tree and the evening is a great deal cooler than the one you left. Come for dinner rather than lunch, because the drive up at dusk gives you the whole bay laid out below with the lights coming on. This is the one outing on the list that is better after dark, and it is twenty minutes away.

A narrow inlet cut into the rock, so still and so clear that people swim in the harbour itself, with fishing boats moored a few metres away and tavernas built right along the edge. Fifteen minutes from the hotel and it feels like a different decade: no strip, no noise, just a village that happens to have one of the prettiest small harbours on this coast. Go for a long lunch, swim off the rocks afterwards, and come back. It is among the least demanding things on this list and one of the nicest.

One man built this over decades on the coast at Hersonissos: a stone house furnished as it would have been, a windmill, an olive press, a wine press, a shepherd's shelter, and gardens of herbs and fruit trees you are invited to smell and taste. The whole place runs on the principle that you should handle things rather than read labels about them, which makes it far livelier than a folk museum has any right to be. About two hours, flat, shaded by the gardens, and it explains more about how this island actually lived than any of the palaces do.

The tree is the reason to go: a plane so old and so vast that it takes several people with arms outstretched to ring the trunk, standing over the village spring where the water still runs cold out of Venetian stone troughs. The tavernas put their tables in its shade, and the local order is sarikopita, the coiled cheese pie fried and finished with honey. It is a short stop rather than a day, and it pairs naturally with Mochos on the same road up, or with the Lasithi plateau beyond it.

An hour of switchbacks and you come out somewhere that looks like it belongs to another country: a perfectly flat bowl of fields at 850 metres, ringed by mountains the whole way round, with villages spaced along the rim. It has been farmed continuously for thousands of years, and the white cloth sails of its irrigation windmills, thousands of them once and far fewer now, are the image of Crete that ends up on every poster. It is noticeably cooler than the coast, which in August is reason enough. The cost is the road: an hour of bends each way.

A small three-aisled church under cypresses on the road up to Kritsa, painted inside from floor to vault in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and never whitewashed over. Every surface is covered: the life of Christ, a crowded Second Coming, and a rare portrait of Saint Francis that has no business being in a Greek Orthodox church and is exactly what makes the place interesting. It takes twenty minutes to see and is one of those rooms people remember for years. Kritsa itself is a little further on, a proper hill village known for its weaving, and good for lunch afterwards.

The vineyards south of Heraklion have been making wine for something like four thousand years, and the interesting part is that they do it with grapes almost nobody outside Greece has drunk: Vidiano and Vilana in white, Kotsifali and Liatiko in red. Several estates around Peza and Archanes run tastings and will walk you through the cellar. Archanes village itself was restored street by street and is now one of the prettiest in Crete, with a square made for a long lunch. Half a day, a driver, and almost no walking.

Ten minutes west and considerably more varied than Malia: a long seafront promenade, a small harbour with the boats lit up, and enough restaurants and bars that you can pick rather than settle. There are Roman fish tanks cut into the rock at the water's edge, easy to miss and worth finding. If you only go out once in the evening, this is the place to do it, and it is close enough to come home from at any hour without planning anything.

Malia's reputation belongs to a few specific streets near the beach. Walk inland and uphill instead and you find the village those streets grew out of: narrow whitewashed lanes, bougainvillea over the doorways, old men outside the kafeneio, and tavernas with six tables and no menu in English. It is ten minutes away and nobody is selling you anything. Worth one evening, accepting that you have already paid for a dinner you are not eating.

Malia and Hersonissos both have reputations; the beach between them has none, and that is the appeal. Stalis is a long shallow sweep of sand with the water staying waist-deep a good way out, a row of unhurried tavernas behind it, and none of the volume of either neighbour. It is the obvious change of scene on a day when nobody wants to organise anything: eight minutes in a taxi, or a walk along the sand if the morning is cool enough.

Milatos is a handful of tavernas along a pebbly shore where the fish comes off the boats and lunch takes as long as you let it. Above the village a rocky path leads in about ten minutes to a large cave where several hundred villagers sheltered during the revolt of 1823 and were killed after a siege. There is a small chapel inside now, and an ossuary. It is a quiet, serious place ten minutes' walk from a very good lunch, which is a combination Crete does better than anywhere.

Twelve hundred rooms, a throne room with the gypsum seat still in place, red columns that taper downwards, and the labyrinth the Minotaur story was built on. It is the biggest thing the Minoans left and there is a reason everyone goes. The catch is Sir Arthur Evans, who rebuilt large parts of it in concrete a century ago according to what he thought it should look like, and opinions on the result have never settled: it is the lowest-rated thing on this list. In August it is also hot, exposed, uneven and very crowded. If you go, go at opening time and take a guide, because without one a lot of it is just concrete.

On the rim of the Lasithi plateau, at just over a thousand metres, the cave where Rhea is said to have hidden the newborn Zeus from his father. People left offerings here for well over a millennium and the archaeology bears the story out as a real cult site. Four hundred steps descend into a chamber of stalactites around a still black pool. It is genuinely impressive, and it is the hardest thing on this list by a wide margin: a steep fifteen-minute climb to the mouth, then those steps, worn smooth and often wet. Donkeys are available for the climb up. Not one for a bad knee.

The twentieth entry is not a place. Two or three outings across five days is the plan, which leaves at least two days with nothing in them at all, and those are reliably the ones people describe afterwards. The sea is at its warmest all year in August, four pools and a private stretch of beach are directly downstairs, dinner is cooked for you, and none of it has to be earned. If the north wind gets up and the beach turns choppy, that is the afternoon for the aquarium.