Rethymno at Night: The Old Town After Dark

Chania gets the postcards. Rethymno gets the evenings.

It is the best-preserved old town in Crete — a dense knot of Venetian and Ottoman streets that never got flattened and never got tidied — and it is genuinely at its best once the sun has gone and the stone has stopped throwing heat back at you. What follows is how we would spend an evening there, in the order we would spend it.

Start high, before the light goes

The Fortezza sits on the headland above the town, an enormous Venetian fortress from the sixteenth century whose walls enclose far more open ground than you expect — grass, wildflowers, a scattering of ruins and one domed mosque, with the sea on three sides.

Go about ninety minutes before sunset. The light on the walls at that hour is extraordinary, and from the seaward ramparts you get the whole town laid out beneath you with the White Mountains behind. Check the day's closing time before you set off, because it shuts in the early evening and the hours shift with the season. If you arrive to find the gate closed, walk the road that skirts the outside of the walls instead — it is quiet, it looks west, and almost nobody does it.

Then drop into the lanes

Come down off the headland and let yourself get lost. This is the part of Rethymno that rewards having no plan at all.

The old town is a genuinely layered place: Venetian doorways with carved lintels, Ottoman wooden balconies overhanging lanes barely wide enough for a scooter, the odd minaret rising out of the roofline. The Rimondi Fountain, with its worn lion heads spilling water into stone basins, is the sort of thing you round a corner into rather than seek out. So is the great minaret of the Neratze, floodlit and visible from half the streets in the quarter.

Do this on foot and do it slowly. The whole old town is walkable in twenty minutes if you march, which is exactly the wrong way to see it.

The harbour — and an honest word about it

The little Venetian harbour is the image everyone comes for: a curved stone quay, fishing boats, the old lighthouse standing at the mouth, and a solid rank of tavernas with tables right up to the water.

It is beautiful, and it is also the most aggressively touted and most expensive fifty metres in Rethymno. Every restaurant has someone outside with a laminated menu and a great deal of enthusiasm. If you want to eat there, eat there — the setting is worth something and nobody should be sniffy about it. But go in knowing you are paying for the view, and be comfortable walking past six people to reach the one you actually chose.

The better move, if you only want the picture: go for a drink at the harbour, then eat two streets inland where the prices halve and the Cretan cooking gets noticeably better.

Where the evening actually settles

Rethymno has a university, and it shows. Once you are away from the waterfront, the squares fill up with people who live here — students, families out late with small children, older men playing backgammon well past midnight. It gives the town a texture that purely tourist-facing places never manage.

Things run late. Greek dinner starts at nine and the old town is still busy at one in the morning in August. If you have been eating at seven and wondering where everyone is, that is why.

The one thing most visitors get wrong

They do it every single night.

Rethymno is a wonderful evening out, and by the fourth consecutive one — the drive in, parking somewhere hopeful, the same lanes, the same nine o'clock table, the drive back — something has quietly gone out of it. Especially with children, who are magnificent for the first two nights and unrecognisable by the fifth.

The villas around Rethymno are extraordinary, and the terraces are where the view actually is. Build a couple of nights in around staying put. If you want ideas for what to do with those evenings, we have written about Chania after dark as a companion piece, and about choosing between Chania, Rethymno and Elounda when you are still deciding where to base yourself.

And on one of those nights in, we can bring the cinema to you — a proper screen, cinema sound and styled seating on your own terrace, set up in the afternoon and gone by morning. Rethymno is well inside our patch. Tell us your dates and we will tell you honestly whether we can do it well.