Skopelos

Where it sits. Skopelos is the middle island of the Northern Sporades, a wedge of limestone and pine roughly 96 square kilometres in area, lying about 25 nautical miles off the Thessalian mainland with Skiathos an hour to the west and Alonnisos a short hop east. Mount Delfi reaches 681 metres near the centre and forest covers close to two thirds of the surface, a density that is genuinely unusual in the Aegean and that sets the island's colour scheme: Aleppo pine running all the way down to the tideline, so the shallows read bottle-green rather than the bleached turquoise of the Cyclades. The southern and western shores hold the sheltered bays and almost all of the swimming; the north-eastern flank, open to the summer meltemi, is a long wall of cliff broken by only a handful of coves.

A long and specific history. In antiquity the island was Peparethos, settled by Chalcidians and, in the founding story, by Staphylos, a figure the Greeks made a son of Dionysus and Ariadne. That name attached itself to a bay on the south coast where, in 1936, the archaeologist Nikolaos Platon excavated a Late Bronze Age chamber tomb containing a gold-hilted sword and gilded ornaments, which is why guidebooks reach for the word Minoan here. Peparethian wine travelled the ancient Aegean in stamped amphorae and paid for the island's classical prosperity. Venetian lords of the Ghisi family held the Sporades after 1204; the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa sacked the island in 1538, an event the local chronicle never quite got over. The stone-and-slate architecture that survives in the Chora is protected, which is why the roofs are grey schist slabs rather than the terracotta tiles you see on Skiathos.

The Chora. Skopelos Town rises in tiers around a north-facing harbour, white cubes stacked on stone lanes with wooden balconies painted in faded blues and reds, and the whole amphitheatre is capped by a Kastro built on the ancient acropolis, where the small eleventh-century church of Agios Athanasios stands. Islanders claim 123 churches within the town and something like 360 across the island; the figures are repeated more for effect than for accuracy, but walk five minutes in any direction and a locked chapel with a whitewashed courtyard will make the claim feel plausible. The waterfront is working rather than ornamental — caiques, the fish market, bakeries selling the fried spiral cheese pie that Skopelos treats as a civic emblem, and shops selling the dried plums from the orchards inland.

On screen. Skopelos took the largest share of the Greek exteriors for Mamma Mia!, shot between late August and September 2007. Kastani, a pine-backed pebble bay on the south-west coast, was the production's principal beach: the crew built a beach bar and a wooden jetty there and dismantled both once filming wrapped, though a taverna has since gone back up on roughly the same footing. The wedding procession climbs to the chapel of Agios Ioannis sto Kastri, which sits on a monolithic rock on the north-east coast near Glossa. Glysteri, the shingle cove north of the Chora, also served the unit and now appears on every boat tour sold at the harbour. Three things regularly surprise visitors:

• The harbour village with the dancing on the quay is not on Skopelos at all — it is Damouchari, on the Pelion peninsula on the mainland.
• Donna's hotel never existed as a building; it was a set constructed on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios in England.
• The chapel interior was likewise a set, because the real chapel is a single room a few metres across.

What you actually do here. Swim, mostly, and walk between the swims. Stafylos and the naturist beach at Velanio sit four kilometres south of town; Agnontas, a hamlet with a jetty, doubles as the island's alternative ferry port when the meltemi closes the main harbour; Limnonari, Panormos, Milia and Kastani follow up the west coast, with Elios and Loutraki serving the north. Inland, the Palouki hill east of the Chora carries a cluster of monasteries — Evangelistria, Prodromos, Metamorfosi — linked by old cobbled mule paths, and the network of restored kalderimia crossing the island is the best walking in the Sporades outside Alonnisos. Plums, almonds and olives are still farmed commercially, so the interior is worked land rather than scrub.

Getting there and timing. There is no airport. Ferries run from Volos, from Agios Konstantinos and, most usefully, from Mantoudi on Evia in about an hour and forty minutes; the majority of foreign visitors fly into Skiathos and cross by hydrofoil or catamaran in forty to sixty minutes. Sailings thin out sharply from late October and the island turns genuinely quiet in winter, when many tavernas close and the ferry schedule contracts to a lifeline service. High summer brings heat and full beaches; the shoulder weeks either side of it give warm water, open kitchens and a fighting chance of having Kastani to yourself before ten in the morning.