What Is Rethymno Like?

The short answer

Rethymno feels like a small Cretan city that happens to have tourists in it, rather than a resort that happens to have Cretans in it. That distinction is the whole character of the place.

The four Rethymnos

The town divides cleanly into parts that feel nothing like each other.

The old town is the reason to come. Venetian street plan, Ottoman overlay: narrow lanes, wooden upper storeys projecting over your head, doorways with carved Venetian lintels, bougainvillea, and the occasional minaret above the roofline. It is dense and shaded, which matters in August, and largely closed to traffic, which matters always. Souliou Street is the narrow shopping lane everyone photographs; Ethnikis Antistaseos is the market street where the town actually buys things. The Rimondi Fountain, dated 1626, sits in a small square in the middle and still runs.

The Fortezza occupies the Paleokastro hill at the north-west corner - a Venetian fortress built between 1573 and 1580, largely emptied of its buildings but with intact ramparts. It is a shell, and the point of going up is the walk around the walls and the view down over terracotta roofs to open sea. In summer it hosts the Renaissance Festival, which is the best use anyone has found for it.

The beach and the strip run east from the old harbour: sand, shallow water, and behind it a coast road lined with large hotels, car-hire desks and restaurants with laminated menus in six languages. This stretch, out towards Platanes and Adele, is ordinary package-holiday Crete. It is not unpleasant, but nobody would describe it as Rethymno.

The new town and the university sit above and behind, and this is where the town lives - apartment blocks, a hospital, supermarkets, the University of Crete's humanities and social-sciences campus on the hill. Several thousand students give the town a completely different texture from a purely seasonal resort.

What a day feels like

Mornings start late. Shops open around nine, the market street fills, and the old town is cool and quiet enough to walk properly. By eleven the day-trip coaches have arrived and the main lanes are busy.

Between two and five the town more or less stops. Lunch is long, shops close, and the heat pushes everyone indoors or into the sea. This is not a slogan - it is a scheduling fact, and planning around it saves a lot of frustration.

From six the old town refills, this time with locals as well as visitors. Sunset is the best hour: the Fortezza walls and the harbour mole both catch it, and the light on the Venetian stone is the thing photographers come for. Dinner starts around nine and runs late; the bar streets in the old town are loud until two or three in the morning in July and August, which is worth knowing before you book a room on one of them.

Season by season

Season	What it is like
April-May	Green, mild, quiet. Wildflowers inland, sea still cold. Best month for walking
June	Warm, busy but not yet full, sea comfortable. Arguably the best all-round month
July-August	Hot, crowded and loud in the old town; the beach strip at capacity; everything open
September-October	Warm sea, thinning crowds, harvest under way inland. The other best window
November-March	Rain, wind, closed beach hotels - but the old town keeps working because of the students. Carnival, one of the largest in Greece, falls in late winter

The texture of the place

• It is walkable and hostile to cars. The old town lanes are barely wide enough for a vehicle and much of it is restricted. Park at the edge - there are paid lots near the harbour and along the seafront - and walk.
• It is not expensive. Food, coffee and accommodation all price below Chania, and well below Santorini or Mykonos.
• English is widespread, and so are German, and increasingly French and Italian, in anything tourist-facing.
• The mountains are always visible. Psiloritis, at 2,456 metres the highest point in Crete, rises to the south-east; the White Mountains sit to the west. The town is never more than forty minutes from serious terrain.
• The sea is on the north side, which means it catches the north wind. When it blows, the beach is choppy and the south coast is the better swim.
• Cats. A great many, mostly fed, entirely unbothered by you.

What Rethymno is not

It is not a luxury destination, and it is not trying to be. There are no cliff-edge infinity pools of the kind the Cyclades sell. The old town has good small hotels rather than grand ones. The harbour front is pretty but the restaurants on it are the weakest food in the city - the good places are one street back, or out in the villages.

It is also not a quiet place in August. If you want silence in high summer, stay in a village inland or on the south coast and come into town for the evening.

Who tends to like it

People who want a real town rather than a resort; people who want to walk everywhere; people using Crete as a touring base; returning visitors who have already done Chania and Santorini and want somewhere they can settle into. People who want everything laid on within a single hotel complex tend to prefer the strip east of town, and to see very little of the place described above.