Tours in Kos

Kos is the third largest of the Dodecanese and lies four kilometres off the Turkish coast, close enough that Bodrum is forty-five minutes by ferry. It is also unusually flat for a Greek island, which is why it is the one people cycle: there are marked bike lanes along the coast and out to the beaches. The town has a Hellenistic and Roman core excavated after an earthquake in 1933, with the agora, an odeon and a casa romana with mosaics, all overlooked by the Knights of St John castle at the harbour mouth. The plane tree beside it is said to be the one Hippocrates taught under; it is not that old, but the connection is real enough, because the Asklepieion, the healing sanctuary founded in his name in the fourth century BC, sits on a terraced hillside four kilometres out of town with a view across to Asia Minor.

The island is booked as a mix of antiquity and water. The Asklepieion and the town excavations are a morning with a guide. Boat trips go to Nisyros, an active volcano whose crater you can walk into, and to Kalymnos and Pserimos; the crossing to Bodrum is a day out in another country and needs a passport. On land there is cycling, the hot springs at Therma where a walled pool of thermal water meets the sea, the mountain village of Zia for the sunset, and the long beaches along the southern coast at Paradise and Agios Stefanos, where the basilica ruins stand on the sand.

Practical. Kos is windy in high summer, which is comfortable on the beach and awkward on the boats — the Nisyros trip is cancelled for swell often enough to be worth booking early in your stay. Season runs May to October. The flat terrain makes bicycles genuinely useful and they are cheap to hire, but there is no shade on the coastal path. The airport is in the middle of the island, half an hour from town. Ferries to Bodrum need a passport and an advance booking. Tavernas in the town square charge for the tree; the streets behind cost less.