Mykonos Town

Where it sits. Mykonos is a granite island of about 85 square kilometres in the northern Cyclades, low, dry and almost treeless, with its highest point a modest 341 metres. It lies immediately east of Delos, the sacred island of antiquity, whose ruins are visible from the western beaches and reachable by boat in half an hour. Roughly 10,700 people live here permanently. The landscape is bare rock, dry-stone walling and wind-shaped scrub, and the wind is a defining fact: the meltemi blows hard from the north through July and August, which is why the old town's lanes twist as they do and why the north-coast beaches are often unusable while the south coast is calm.

The Chora. Mykonos Town is one of the most tightly composed settlements in the Aegean, a maze of whitewashed cubes and narrow paved lanes deliberately laid out to confuse raiders and to break the wind, with the joints between paving stones repainted white by hand every spring. Three set pieces anchor it. Kato Mili, the row of stone windmills on the ridge above the harbour, dates from the sixteenth century onwards, when the island milled grain for passing ships; five of the sixteen historic mills stand in the famous line. Alefkandra, universally called Little Venice, is a terrace of eighteenth-century merchants' and sea captains' houses built with their wooden balconies overhanging the water. Panagia Paraportiani, by the old harbour, is not one church but five, merged and re-plastered over centuries from a foundation begun in 1425 into a single asymmetric white mass that looks sculpted rather than built.

On screen. Mykonos has two film credits that visitors still chase. Shirley Valentine, Lewis Gilbert's 1989 adaptation of Willy Russell's play with Pauline Collins and Tom Conti, shot its entire Greek half here after opening in Liverpool: the taverna where Shirley drinks wine looking at the sea, and the beach where the film's turn happens, are on Agios Ioannis on the south-west coast, which faces Delos and which is now marketed locally under the film's name. Thirteen years later, Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity closed on the same island — the final scene, in which Jason Bourne finds Marie renting scooters to tourists, was filmed on Mykonos, the only Greek location in a production otherwise shot in Paris, Prague, Rome, Imperia and Zurich. The two films are a useful measure of what happened to the island in between: the 1989 taverna coast is now lined with beach clubs.

Beaches and the day rhythm. The south coast holds the sand. Psarou and Platys Gialos are the organised, expensive end; Paradise and Super Paradise built the island's party reputation from the 1960s onwards; Elia is the longest beach and the one with a serious naturist and gay tradition; Agios Sostis and Fokos in the north are undeveloped and often windswept. Ornos and Agios Ioannis are family-scale and sheltered. Sunbed pairs at the branded clubs can cost more than a hotel night elsewhere in Greece, which surprises people who arrive without checking. The season now runs from Easter into October and the island's economy is built almost entirely on it.

Delos. Two kilometres west lies the reason Mykonos exists at all. Delos was the mythological birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, the treasury of the Delian League and, in the late Hellenistic period, a free port of perhaps 25,000 people and one of the busiest slave markets in the Mediterranean. The whole island is an archaeological site, on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1990, with the Terrace of the Lions, the theatre quarter, the House of Dionysus mosaics and the Sacred Way still legible. Nobody may stay overnight; boats leave from the old port in the morning and return in the afternoon, and the crossing is cancelled in strong wind.

Getting there and timing. Mykonos airport takes direct flights from across Europe in summer and domestic flights from Athens year-round; ferries run from Piraeus and Rafina in two to five hours depending on the vessel, and fast links connect to Paros, Naxos, Santorini and Tinos. The new port north of town handles the large ferries and the cruise ships. In July and August the island is at capacity, prices peak and the meltemi can disrupt sailings for days at a time. Late May, June, mid-September and early October give warm water, working restaurants and rates that are merely high rather than extraordinary. Winter is genuinely quiet, with a small resident population, a handful of open tavernas and no beach economy at all.