The largest Cyclades island — marble mountains, Byzantine villages, and the best beaches in the archipelago
Naxos is the biggest and most fertile island in the Cyclades — a place that grows its own potatoes, citrus, and the prized Naxian cheese, and has enough interior to get genuinely lost in. The Portara, an enormous marble doorway standing alone on a small islet by the harbour (all that remains of an unfinished Temple of Apollo), greets every arriving ferry. Inland, the Tragaea valley holds medieval tower-houses and Byzantine churches tucked among olive groves.
In antiquity Naxos was a centre of Cycladic culture and later famous for its marble quarries, which supplied sculptors throughout the Greek world — the colossal 10.7-metre kouros statues still lying in the island's quarries, abandoned and unfinished around 600 BCE, are among the most haunting ancient artefacts in Greece. The Venetian Sanudo family made Naxos the capital of their Duchy of the Archipelago in 1207, and the Kastro (Venetian castle) above the town still houses Catholic descendants of that era in its tower-houses.