Seeing the Old Town without the crowds

Everyone arrives at the same gate. Between ten and one, the coaches unload at the Spianada and the whole of the Old Town funnels down the same three streets: Nikiforou Theotoki, Filarmonikis, and whichever alley has the ice cream. It is a beautiful place having its worst hour.

The town has four ways in and the crowd only ever uses one. Here is how to use the other three.

Start at the far end, not the near one

The instinct is to start at the Liston, because that is where the coaches stop and where the photographs come from. It is also the single most congested two hundred metres on the island between ten and one.

Start instead at the New Fortress, at the north-west corner. It is a ten-minute walk from where you would otherwise begin and almost nobody does it. You get the same Venetian stonework with nobody in the frame, and you arrive at the Liston from behind at the point in the day when it is starting to empty rather than fill.

The hour the Liston empties

Between half past one and half past two, the town changes hands. The day groups are called back to the coaches and the town returns to the people who live in it. The arcade cafés stop turning tables. Waiters stand still. The light comes down the colonnade at an angle it does not manage at any other hour.

If you have one hour in Corfu Town, make it that one. If you have a driver waiting, tell them you would rather have the late lunch than the early one: every guide on our fleet knows exactly what you mean by it.

Three streets to walk, one to skip

The Old Town is not a museum with a route through it. But four hundred years of Venetian planning left a logic in the *kantounia*, the narrow lanes, and it rewards walking rather than being pointed at.

• Agiou Spyridonos, for the church and its bell tower. Go inside. It is dim, gold and entirely unlike the outside.
• Guilford, for the balconies. Look up. The washing lines between buildings are not staged for you and that is exactly why they are worth seeing.
• Moustoxidi, for a street that still belongs to the town, a barber, a bakery, someone's grandmother on a chair.
• Skip the main run of souvenir shops between the Liston and the Old Port unless you actually want a fridge magnet. Nothing there is from Corfu.

What to do about the heat

From late June to early September the stone holds the afternoon and gives it back until nine at night. There is no shade in the middle of the Spianada and very little on the sea-facing side of the fortress.

Walk in the morning, sit in the middle of the day, walk again after six. Locals have been doing this for four hundred years and they are not being lazy about it.

Getting there without the parking problem

There is no good parking in the Old Town. There is barely any parking near the Old Town in August, and the two municipal car parks fill by half past nine.

If you are staying north of Dassia or south of Benitses, the drive in is easy and the last ten minutes are not. It is the one part of a Corfu day where a driver earns their fee twice: you are put down at the New Fortress and collected at the Old Port, and the parking never becomes your problem.

If you only have three hours

New Fortress, down through the kantounia to Agiou Spyridonos, out onto the Liston at half past one, lunch under the arcade, and the Old Fortress last, with the walk up to the lighthouse if the day is clear and you have the legs for it.

That is a full three hours, it is almost entirely downhill, and it puts you in the two best places at the two right times.

Walking it with somebody who knows it

The three hours above are a plan you can run yourself, and most people should. Where a guide changes the day is inside the fortresses and the churches, where the interesting part is what you are looking at rather than how to find it, and where Greek law reserves commentary to state-licensed guides in any case.

If that is the day you want, Corfu's legacy is the version with a licensed guide in it, and the Old Town on foot is the shorter one that stays inside the walls.

Cruise passengers have a different problem, which is the clock rather than the crowd. Our shore excursions are planned backwards from the all-aboard time, and the walk in from the terminal is its own decision, which we have written out separately in port to the Old Town.