Corfu Old Town & Venetian Fortress Tour

Corfu Town's Old Town is one of the best-preserved Venetian-era settlements in the Mediterranean, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2007, and a full day exploring it on foot reveals layer upon layer of Venetian, French, and British colonial architecture pressed into a compact peninsula. The tour begins at the New Fortress — a Venetian construction of the 1570s built on a promontory north of the harbour — whose star-shaped bastions and underground cisterns are among the finest examples of Renaissance military engineering in Greece. From there the route moves through the narrow covered streets of the kantoúnia, the labyrinthine lanes of the old town that slope downhill toward the Spianada, Europe's second-largest public square. The Liston arcades running along its western edge were commissioned during the French occupation in imitation of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. The Old Fortress, on a separate promontory connected by a drawbridge, houses a small Byzantine museum and offers a wide view of the Albanian coast. Saint Spyridon Church — dedicated to the island's patron saint whose mummified body is kept in a silver reliquary — is one of the most venerated Orthodox churches in Greece and is visited mid-tour. The afternoon traces the Jewish quarter and the Venetian-era arsenal district before ending at a seafront café in the Old Harbour. Corfu Town is walkable year-round; October through April the crowds thin considerably and the Venetian architectural details are easier to examine without queues.