Ferries from Kissamos

Kissamos is western Crete's port and it does something no other Cretan harbour does: it connects the island northward to Kythira and Antikythera, and through them to the Peloponnese. Every other Crete ferry runs to Piraeus or along the coast.

What sails

• Kythira — about 3 hours 15 minutes, 2 sailings, SeaJets.
• Antikythera — about 1 hour 50 minutes, 1 sailing.

3 active sailings across the port.

⚠ Three sailings is the entire scheduled service

This is a genuinely thin connection across open water between Crete and the Peloponnese, and it is seasonal. A cancelled boat has no same-day alternative and the fallback is a flight or the long way round via Piraeus.

Do not put this leg on the day before a flight home, and check the current schedule rather than assuming last year's.

Antikythera

The island between here and Kythira has a population in double figures. It is also where sponge divers in 1901 recovered the Antikythera mechanism from a wreck — a geared bronze device for computing astronomical positions, made more than two thousand years ago and unmatched in complexity for over a millennium afterwards.

The mechanism is in Athens. The island is still almost empty.

Balos and Gramvousa

The excursion boats to the Balos lagoon and the Venetian fortress on Gramvousa leave from this harbour in season. They are day trips rather than transport, they do not appear in a ferry timetable, and they are the reason most visitors come to the port at all.

Where the port is

The harbour sits a couple of kilometres from Kissamos town on the northwest coast, with Chania about forty minutes east by road. Buses meet the main sailings.