EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

GALAXÍDHI , a quiet port rearing mirage-like out of an otherwise lifeless shore 17km southwest of Itéa, is the first place you'd want to break a journey voluntarily. The old town stands on a raised headland, crowned by the eighteenth-century church of Áyios Nikólaos (the old, basilica-like one, not the more obvious belfryed structure), patron saint of sailors. With its protected double harbour, the place would have been irrestistible to early settlers, and sure enough you see stretches of Pelasgian walls - all that's left of ancient Oianthe - between the two churches and the water on the headland dividing the two anchorages. Amazingly, Galaxídhi was once one of Greece's major harbours, with a fleet of over four hundred two- and three- masted kaïkia and schooners, built alongside Hirólakkas anchorage, north of the headland. But shipowners failed to convert to steampower after 1890, and the town's prosperity vanished. Clusters of nineteenth-century shipowners' mansions, reminders of those heady days, don't match the rest of Fokídha province architecturally, but reflect borrowings from Venice, testament to the sea-captains' far-flung travels. Lately they've become the haunt of Athenian second-homers, but despite their restorations and a bit of a marina ethos down at the main southern harbour, the town still remains just the right side of tweeness, with an animated commercial high street and a good range of places to eat and drink.

Just uphill from the south harbour, a small maritime museum (Tues-Fri 9.30am-1pm, Sat & Sun 9.30am-2pm; ¬1.50) contains paintings and models of ships as well as old figureheads, while a modest folk art museum (daily except Tues 9.30am-1.30pm; ¬1.50), in an imposing tower-mansion just inland from Hirólakkas, has three rooms of turn-of-the-century embroideries and fashions. Both are set to move into a combined museum, under construction, close to the existing maritime display.

If you stroll around the pine-covered headland flanking the south harbour, you'll find tiny pebbly coves where most people swim, with chapel-crowned islets offshore. The closest "real" beach is Kalafátis just north of town, though this isn't brilliant - harsh shingle underfoot and occasionally turbid water. The only other local diversion is the four-kilometre drive up to the monastery of Metamórfosis Sotíros , well signposted under the flyover just west of town; the magnificent view is the attraction, as the thirteenth-century katholikón is visibly unsound structurally and bare of frescoes - a single nun lives in the modern cloister alongside.