The Old Town of Rhodes takes three hours on foot, and the only decision that matters is which gate you enter by. Most people come in at Eleftherias because that is where the bus stops, which drops them into the middle of the commercial streets and means the whole walk is uphill. Do the opposite.
Enter at the d’Amboise Gate
Northwest corner, and the quietest of the eleven gates. The passage beneath it is long and dark, and walking through it is the only way to feel how thick the walls really are, since from outside they simply read as tall. It puts you at the highest point inside the town.
Everything from here is downhill. In July that counts for a great deal.
The Palace of the Grand Master
Worth knowing before you pay: this is largely a 1930s Italian reconstruction. The original was wrecked in 1856 when a gunpowder store under the church of St John exploded, and Mussolini’s administration rebuilt it as a summer residence he never once visited. The Roman floor mosaics inside were lifted from Kos and installed here.
It is still impressive. It is just not what the guidebook photograph implies.
The Street of the Knights
Two hundred metres of cobbled slope lined with the inns of the eight langues, the national divisions of the Order of St John, each with its own coat of arms above the door. It is the most photographed street on the island. At 8am you will have it to yourself; by 11am you will be shuffling.
Down to Suleiman Mosque and Socratous
The pink mosque at the top of Socratous dates from 1522, the year the Ottomans finally took the island after a six-month siege. Below it, Socratous is a frank tourist bazaar and has never pretended to be anything else.
The trick is to turn off it. Take any lane left or right and within 30 metres you are in a residential quarter with washing strung between balconies, which is where the 6,000 people who actually live inside the walls do their living.
The moat
Almost everyone skips this and they are wrong. The dry moat encircling the walls is now a shaded walking route, it never held water, and from down there you finally get the scale of the fortifications looking up rather than along. It is also 5 degrees cooler than the streets above, which in August matters more than the history does.
Practical notes
- Best hours are before 10am and after 8pm. In between the town belongs to the cruise ships.
- Wear proper soles. The pebble mosaic paving is slick and the marble of the Knights’ street is worse.
- Residents drive inside the walls. It is not the pedestrian zone it appears to be.
- Sunset is best from the Windmills on the mole rather than from anywhere inside the walls.
What this page does not offer
Company on Rhodes. This agency works in Athens and Mykonos only, has no presence anywhere in the Dodecanese, and arranges nothing on this island. That is the full extent of it. If your route home runs through the capital, the Athens page is the relevant one.
