Tinos

ΑTwo islands in one

Tinos sits between Andros and Mykonos, twenty minutes by ferry from the loudest island in Greece and a world away from it. It is large — 194 square kilometres, around fifty villages still lived in — and it does two completely different things at once. It is the most important Orthodox pilgrimage site in the country, and it is a quiet, green, stone-built walking and eating island that most foreign visitors have never considered.

The two halves meet at the port. The ferry docks, and straight ahead a wide marble-paved street climbs 800 metres to the Church of Panagia Evangelistria. On 15 August, the Dormition of the Virgin, pilgrims cover that street on their hands and knees. The rest of the year it is simply the handsomest approach to any church in the Cyclades.

ΒThe villages are the point

Inland, Tinos is terraced hillside, dry-stone walls and villages that were built to be invisible from the sea. Pyrgos in the north-west is the marble village: its school of fine arts has been turning out sculptors for two centuries, the cemetery is an open-air gallery, and the Museum of Marble Crafts explains how a lump of the mountain becomes a fanlight. Volax sits in a field of granite boulders the size of houses, which is as odd as it sounds. Kardiani and Isternia hang off the west slope above the sea. Around Tarabados stand the dovecotes — elaborate pierced-stone towers, Venetian in origin, of which the island has about a thousand.

Above them all is Exomvourgo, the jagged rock the Venetians fortified and held until 1715, longer than they held anywhere else in the Aegean. The walk up takes well under an hour and the view covers half the Cyclades.

ΓBeaches, with a warning about the wind

The south coast is the easy side: Agios Sostis, Agios Ioannis Porto and Kionia are sandy, shallow and reachable by bus. The north coast is the beautiful side — Kolymbithra is the island's best-known bay and Livada its wildest — but it faces the meltemi head-on. From mid-May to mid-September that north wind can turn a swim into an argument. Ask which side is sheltered before you drive; islanders do.

ΔEating

This is the real surprise. Tinos has artichokes, capers, wild greens, louza (air-dried pork), and a generation of cooks who came home. Lunch at Thalassaki on the water at Ormos Ysternion is the island's set piece; To Perivoli in Kardiani and the tavernas of Volax are the everyday version. Book in August.

ΕGetting there and when to go

No airport, and none likely: the flat plain that could hold one is the farmland of Falatados, and the villages said no. Ferries run from Rafina and Piraeus, usually via Andros or Mykonos — see ferries. May, June and September are the island at its best. Go on 15 August only if the pilgrimage is the reason you came; every bed on Tinos is taken.