The Roman harbour

There has been a settlement here since Minoan times, helped by the shelter of the Kastri headland. In the Hellenistic period it served as the port of Lyttos, a powerful inland city, and it minted its own coinage with a ship's prow on it.

Its best years came under Rome. The harbour had jetties and roofed shipsheds, and the town had fountains with mosaic floors and small cascades running through them.

The most visible survival is the group of fish tanks cut into the rock at the water's edge — Roman tanks for keeping fish alive, studied by British archaeologists in 1955, who used them to calculate that the sea here has risen by about a metre since they were made. You can see them from the harbour front.

On the Kastri hill east of the small harbours are the remains of an early Christian basilica with mosaic floors, and there is a second at Agios Nikolaos.

Malia and the museum

Seven kilometres east, the Palace of Malia is the third largest Minoan palace on Crete, after Knossos and Phaistos. It sits on flat ground beside the sea and is far less visited than Knossos.

The Lychnostatis Open Air Museum, at the eastern edge of Hersonissos, reconstructs the working life of a Cretan household — the oil press, the still, the loom, the herb garden — on a site above the sea.

Three villages sit on the slope directly above the resort, and they are a different place entirely.

Koutouloufari and Piskopiano are stone-built, with narrow lanes, bougainvillea and tavernas in small squares looking down over the coast. Ano Hersonissos, higher again, is the largest and least visited.

They are two or three kilometres from the seafront and a ten-minute drive, and a great many people stay in them precisely to be out of the noise.

The coast here is developed and organised almost end to end, and the beaches are the reason the town exists.

Star Beach, at the eastern end, is the well-known one: a beach club with a water park, watersports and music through the day.

Anissaras, west of the town, is sandy, calmer and shallower, and is the family choice.

Sarandaris, on the headland, is rockier, with small coves and clear water, and is the quietest of the three.

The town beach itself runs along the seafront and is busy from morning to night.

Nightlife

Hersonissos has one of the largest concentrations of bars and clubs in Greece, along the main seafront strip, and in July and August it runs late every night. This is a large part of why people choose it, and it is also why some people choose somewhere else.

Golf

The Crete Golf Club, a few kilometres inland, is an eighteen-hole championship course laid out across seventy-two hectares of hillside. It is the only golf course on Crete and it is open all year.

The aquarium

Cretaquarium, at Gournes about ten kilometres west, is one of the largest aquariums in Europe, with sixty tanks holding species of the Mediterranean. It is the standard wet-weather and small-children answer for this stretch of coast.