Mandraki mole — the windmills and the deer columns at dusk

Mandraki is the old harbour just outside the medieval walls, and its stone mole is the most quietly photogenic walk in Rhodes Town. Three windmills survive of the fourteen that once ground grain unloaded from the ships, spaced evenly along the arm, with the low round Fort of St Nicholas closing it at the sea end. At the harbour mouth two columns carry the bronze deer, Elafos and Elafina — the spot where the Colossus is popularly, and wrongly, said to have stood.

What a photographer gets here is rhythm. Repeating structures along a straight line are unusual in Greece: a couple can walk the mole and be small between two mills, or be framed tight against a single one with only stone and sky behind. Turn around and the medieval walls and the palace towers close the other end of the frame.

Late afternoon side-lights the mills from the west and warms the old town wall behind them. Dusk is better still: the mills and the fort are floodlit, the harbour water goes flat and doubles them, and the sky over the walls holds colour for a good twenty minutes. Morning puts the sun behind the mills, which is only useful if you want silhouettes.

Practical: the mole is public, free and open at all hours, so this is the reliable fallback when a site has closed. Cruise passengers stream through in the middle of the day and thin out by six. On a northerly the seaward side takes spray. Parking beside Mandraki is scarce — it is a ten-minute walk from the old town gate, which is the easier plan.