Poros town, where the boats sail down the high street

Poros is really two islands. The town stands on Sphairia, a small, steep cone of volcanic rock, and the rest of the island, Kalavria, is a much larger hump of limestone and pine forest to the north and east. The two are joined at Kanali by a channel so narrow that a short bridge crosses it. Sphairia is so small that the town fills it, and almost every house has a view of the water.

That water is the strait. Between Poros town and Galatas on the Peloponnese the channel narrows to a few hundred metres, and everything passes through it: ferries from Piraeus, yachts heading for Hydra and Spetses, fishing caiques, the car ferry and the small boats that cross to Galatas every few minutes, late into the night. Henry Miller, sailing in on his way to Hydra in 1939, wrote that coming into Poros felt like sailing down the streets of a town. It still does.

The waterfront is the town's living room: a long row of cafes, tavernas and shops under the awnings, the boats moored stern-to in front, and the mainland so close across the water that you can hear its church bells. In the evening the whole town walks it. Behind it the old quarter rises in stepped lanes of whitewashed walls, blue doors and bougainvillea, with cats on every step, up to the clock tower, built in 1927, on the highest point of the rock.

From the clock tower, look west across the strait at the mountains of the mainland. Their outline traces a woman lying on her back, her face, breasts and knees against the sky, and the people of Poros call her the Koimomeni, the Sleeping Woman. On summer evenings the sun goes down behind her.

The town has a longer past than it shows. In the 1820s, during the War of Independence, Poros was where the first government of free Greece kept its fleet, and Ioannis Kapodistrias, the country's first governor, set up its first naval base in the bay to the west, where the Hellenic Navy still trains its recruits. His statue stands on the waterfront. The small archaeological museum on Korizis square, named after Alexandros Korizis, the prime minister in 1941, who was born here, holds finds from the Temple of Poseidon and from ancient Troizen across the water.