Day 2: Corfu Town

It was a lovely bright sunny day when we woke up in Corfu Town this morning. After a breakfast of Greek yoghurt and honey on our terrace, we set out to explore some of the island's capital.

I get the impression that Corfu is not a morning kind of place - at least judging by how late people seemed to be out last night - and so the little streets of the old town were pretty quiet as we wandered through them.

We passed some nice churches...

...and a lovely square...

...before coming to a park where we saw beautiful purple trees, which I've previously only seen in Portugal. Having looked them up, we think they are jacaranda trees.

We were making our way across the town to the Old Fortress. This is not to be confused with the New Fortress, which we had seen on our evening stroll last night.

The Old Fortress is so-called because it was built on a promontory which had previously been home to the ancient Byzantine town of Corfu.

While the earliest indications of a fortress on the site date back to the 6th century, the fortifications which are visible today date from Corfu's Venetian period.

In places I thought the big walls looked similar to the fortifications at Kotor in Montenegro, which are also Venetian.

When the Venetians took over the site they decided to turn it into an island, creating this artificial moat channel.

Today there's a bridge you can walk over to reach the fortress.

We paid €10 each and went inside.

There are lots of different buildings within the walls of the fortress. There was a church and even an army barracks from the time when Corfu was under British rule, though I didn't take a photo of that as it wasn't very photogenic.

At the very top of the rocky hill there is a large cross and a lighthouse.

It looked like a long uphill climb, but as we began to make our way up it actually didn't feel that bad.

There were some nice views out across the sea as we climbed.

And once we got to the top there were some great views back towards Corfu Town.

We could see across to the New Fortress, on the opposite side of town.

And we could even see the purple jacaranda trees in the park we'd walked through earlier!

We also realised that there were two cruise ships at the port today; one was significantly bigger than the other.

Although there were other people around, it didn't feel too busy at the fortress. I think perhaps the cruise ship visitors hadn't yet been bussed across town and made it here.

That was good and meant we were able to enjoy the views in relative peace and quiet.

And there were some amazing views!

Corfu does seem to be a really beautiful island.

It was starting to get a little bit busier when we turned around to climb back down.

We stopped at the fortress cafe for a much-needed iced coffee.

As we left the fortress a bit later, we could turn around and see how high we'd been (and it really did look quite high!)

We strolled around the coast for a bit.

There isn't one joined-up promenade path alongside the sea, but everywhere we walked was really pretty.

We were starting to feel hungry by this point, so we stopped at a restaurant not far from our apartment.

I tried pastitsada, not to be confused with pastitsio. This one is a local speciality, made of beef and spaghetti.

Helen went for the more vegetarian option of stuffed peppers.

After lunch we had a rather hot walk to the port to make sure we knew where our boat was leaving from for our excursion tomorrow, then retired to the apartment for a bit to cool off. We ventured out again in the late afternoon for another stroll.