Visiting Crete requires more planning than you might expect, largely because it is the largest island in Greece. That scale — and the long, rugged mountain ranges — will shape much of your trip, from what you’ll see to how long it takes to get from point A to point B.

Driving in Crete: Sheep and Shoulders

It can be hard to appreciate the island’s size from looking at a map, especially when evaluating driving distances; because Crete is so mountainous, it can take an hour or more to drive just twenty-five miles. And there’s every chance that the goats and sheep on the roads will slow you down even further.

When visiting Crete, it’s worth noting that lots of cars drive half off the road, half on the shoulder:

This makes for a big, bi-directional passing lane right in the middle of the roadway, which is efficient, but also sometimes terrifying.

Regional Choices: Where to Stay

You could try to see just half of Crete in a single week, but you would be exhausted. So you’ll either need more time or you’ll have to do some picking and choosing. My sister and I stayed entirely on the west, venturing out for just one day to visit Knossos and the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

Many people flock to the west coast for the long, sandy beaches, so it can feel pretty crowded.

As far as towns go, we thought that Kissamos was underrated and that Rethymno was overrated. We were impressed by the beaches of Paleochora, which seem to have something for everyone, whether you love sand and umbrellas or empty stretches of small pebbles.

But the west coast hosts a lot of tourists, so if you want to get away from it all, we would recommend going up into the mountains (we especially liked it up near Omalos).

If we return, we would like to explore Crete’s more remote eastern half. It doesn’t sound like much goes on there, and that has its own appeal.

Cretan History: Minoans, Mycenaeans, and More

Before visiting Crete, it’s worth spending some time learning about the island’s history — not all sites have good interpretation, so the more context you have before you go, the happier you’re likely to be. You’ll want to know about the Minoans, of course (Knossos will probably be on your itinerary) …

and it’d be good to have a passing understanding of the Mycenaeans.

Then it’s worth having a smattering of knowledge about the Romans, the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the Ottomans … you get the picture (as with so much of southern Greece, Crete saw its fair share of invaders). And the history blogs and books don’t always seem to agree on what happened here, so be prepared to take your reading with a grain of salt.

Eating & Drinking in Crete

You could spend days exploring and enjoying Cretan food. We found ourselves raving about apaki (smoked pork), soft mizithra cheese, sfakianopita (honey and cheese pies), kalitsounia (cheese and/or veggie pies), and Cretan salads (Greek salads, more or less, with impossibly hard croutons and mizithra instead of feta).

In the beverage department, I was pleased to find plenty of fresh orange juice and local retsina (a pine resin-infused wine).

On the downside, every Cretan restaurant serves raki at the end of a meal — think moonshine on a bender. I hated it every time, but the servers would not let me send it away. “It makes you happy,” insisted one gentleman.

Flowers Among the Rocks

One of the most delightful things about Crete is the shocking pink oleander, which you’ll find planted along many roadways and also growing wild in seemingly every ravine (here are some shrubs in the Samaria Gorge):

As with so much of Greece, Crete is rocky and dry — so we were delighted to stumble upon its lush, green, botanic garden.

Making Sense of Crete’s Scale

We loved how wild Crete could be, but we had trouble figuring out how the whole island hung together. It’s so large that even a week wasn’t enough for us to start taking it all in.

We felt like we needed more time to understand the place. If we didn’t want to explore so many other places in Greece, we’d head right back.