Skopelos town, the amphitheatre on the bay

The town stands on the site of ancient Peparethos, the city that gave the island its old name. Its wine was famous across the Greek world, and the islanders struck their own silver coins. Stretches of the city wall of the 5th century BC can still be seen at the top of the town, built into the castle. Down by the sea, at Ampeliki, the ruins of a sanctuary of Asklepios of the 4th century BC have been half eaten away by the waves.

After the Fourth Crusade, the Venetian Ghisi family took the island and built a castle on the ancient walls, at the highest point of the town, in the 13th century. Skopelos passed back and forth between Byzantium and the Latins, and was Venetian again from the 1450s until 1538, when the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa took it and sacked the town. The islanders slowly came back, and because no Turkish population ever settled here, the town kept much of its own life and its old privileges.

What you see today is mostly 18th and 19th century, the age when Skopelos lived from the sea. Its shipyards built sailing ships that traded across the Mediterranean, and sent thirty-five of them to fight in the War of Independence of 1821. The captains' houses have two storeys, wooden balconies and windows, and roofs of slate or tile, never flat. The building rules that came with the 1978 protection still keep it that way.

Count the churches as you climb: there are well over a hundred in the town alone, most of them built by families and opened only on their saint's day. The oldest is Agios Athanasios in the Kastro, a single-aisled basilica of the 11th century with 17th-century frescoes, said to stand on a temple of Athena. Panagitsa tou Pyrgou, white on its rock at the end of the harbour, has a carved 17th-century iconostasis of flowers and birds. The island's patron, Saint Riginos, its bishop martyred in 362, is remembered with a holiday every 25 February.

Skopelos is a place of women's houses. By old custom a bride's parents give the new couple a house, which stays in her name, so the town has grown street by street through its daughters. The writer Pavlos Nirvanas, whose family came from the island, left his house to the town, and it is now the island's history museum, beside the church of the Three Hierarchs. The Folklore Museum in the Nikolaides family house shows the embroidery, the carved furniture and the silk costumes that brides once wore.