Mykonos town

Mykonos town

mykonos townMykonos Town (Mykonos Chora) is definitely one of the nicest and most charming towns of the Greek islands, with endless small streets, shops, windmills, churches, terraces and whitewashed houses. A place to wonder around for days and every time find something unexpected. Because of the street layout (intended to confuse pirates) it"s also the perfect place to lose your way. It has two harbours where you can just sit and have a drink or something to eat, while enjoying the views and the people that walk by, and another harbour where the ferries depart. Some ferries however dock at Tourlos, which is a half an hour walk away from Mykonos town itself. Behind the harbour front you will find endless (and very clean!) shopping streets with souvenirs and jewellery (I guess mainly for the older American tourists that visit Mykonos town on a cruise), the hotels and guesthouses, and more restaurants. Most ticket offices for the ferries are on the main boulevard. Mykonos also has its own international Mykonos JMK Airport.

Mykonos Town is quite large for a Cycladic town. All the houses are painted white and have brightly coloured shutters in front of the windows, mostly blue, green and red. The village goes steeply up the hill with roads and also with stairs on some places. The narrow streets close to the harbour buzz with activity. They are filled with attractive small shops, Bougainville trees in purple bloom, small cafes and churches, and they usually end up at a square with a terraced restaurant and a church, or at the harbour front with its colourful fishing boats, the row of windmills and a pelican or two. Dressed up people mingle with the ones that don"t care so much  and if there is not too much wind (because the "meltemi" can blow from day to day) they all end up in the harbour where the majority of the big restaurants are. Some of the nice, good and cheaper restaurants can be found in the small streets behind the harbour front though.

In Mykonos Town there is an archaeological museum which exhibits vases, ranging from the prehistoric to the late Hellenistic period (25th-1st century B.C.), grave statues, steal and funerary urns from the nearby island of Rheneia, and very few finds from Mykonos. It is also the place where you can make a daytrip to the archaeological site of the island Delos.

As goes for everything, accommodation in Mykonos Town has its advantages and disadvantages. Some good points are that you are always close to the unending nightlife, all the supermarkets and shops are at your feet, and if you are staying near Fabrica square (where the main bus station is situated), you can very easily reach almost every beach on the island by using the cheap and efficient public bus system. Moreover, if you like drinking alcohol when you are going out at night, it is much easier to get back home when home lies within 5-15 minutes of walking (when we say `in` Mykonos Town, we mean a distance of up to 800 meters from the actual town centre), instead of driving your moped back through badly lit streets, or getting a taxi in the early-morning hours when everybody needs one.