Chora & the east

Chora is something else entirely: a single street of marble paving running out along a rock spine, lined with the houses of the shipping families who made Andros rich, and ending at a ruined Venetian castle joined to the shore by a stone bridge. It holds the Museum of Contemporary Art, founded by the Goulandris family, whose summer exhibition regularly brings major names to an island of 9,000 people — and next door the Archaeological Museum, which keeps the Hermes of Andros.

Andros is the second largest of the Cyclades and the least Cycladic of them: springs, streams, plane trees and terraced valleys that stay green into July. Around 300 kilometres of old stone footpaths have been cleared and waymarked as the Andros Route. The one everybody does first is the afternoon from Apikia, where the Sariza spring is, down to the Pythara waterfalls. The fountains of Menites, where the water comes out of lion heads under a plane tree, and Panachrantou monastery, a white fortress on a cliff ledge an hour's climb above Falika, are the other inland set pieces.

The beaches on this side are the wild ones — Achla at the mouth of a river valley, Vitali, Zorkos and Ateni down rough tracks, Paraporti and Gialia within reach of town. Several need a car with some clearance and all of them are exposed to the meltemi.