Skiathos runs on a north-to-southwest axis, gentle and settled on its southern slopes, rugged and wild along the north coast where the land rises to its highest point - 433 meters atop Mount Karafiltzanaka. Much of the island is wooded, the Aleppo pine giving way at Koukounaries to a small, protected stand of stone pine beside a lagoon. The coastline is the real wealth: more than sixty mostly sandy beaches, from Koukounaries and Vromolimnos in the south to wind-swept Xanemos and the dramatic white pebbles of Lalaria in the north, where a natural rock arch frames the sea. Offshore, a scatter of islets - Tsougria chief among them - sits a few kilometers out, clearly visible from the beaches, with Skopelos beyond and the distant shapes of Euboea and Skyros on the clearest days.

Skiathos gave Greece one of its greatest storytellers. Alexandros Papadiamantis was born here in 1851 and died here in 1911, and in between he wrote short stories and novels so steeped in this place that reading them is almost a form of travel. His Skiathos is one of village chapels, fishermen, widows, and saints' days - the island's inner life rather than its beaches. He is not the only name the island claims: the poet Zisis Oikonomou was born here in 1911, and the American actor Richard Romanus made it his home in later life. But it is Papadiamantis whose presence lingers, the writer the island raised and never really let go of.

For a place now devoted to sunshine, Skiathos has a long memory of trouble. In 480 BC, a storm wrecked part of Xerxes' Persian fleet on its rocks, just before the Greek victories at Artemisium and Salamis. Over the centuries the island passed through Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman hands - the corsair-admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa took it in 1538 - and the threat of piracy was constant enough that, for nearly five hundred years, the islanders lived not on the coast but walled up at Kastro, a fortress on the northern cliffs. In 1807, in the hills above the modern town, the monks and rebels of the Evangelistria Monastery wove and raised the first Greek flag, years before independence finally came in 1829.

Today Skiathos draws crowds for lighter reasons. Its airport, opened in 1972 on a low isthmus at the island's northeast corner, has become a destination in itself: the runway sits so close to the road that plane-spotters gather to watch jets roar in just overhead, a few meters above the tarmac and the heads below. And in 2008, Skiathos and neighboring Skopelos stood in for the fictional Greek island of the film Mamma Mia!, their pine-and-turquoise scenery beamed to audiences worldwide. Reach the island by Flying Cat catamaran or ferry from Volos and Agios Konstantinos, then let the buses - five an hour in peak summer - carry you to whichever of those sixty beaches you've decided to find first.