Legend gives Skopelos a divine founder: Staphylos, whose name means grape, said to be a son of Dionysos and the Cretan princess Ariadne. The myth fits the place. In the Late Bronze Age the island, then called Peparethos, was settled by colonists from the Minoan world who brought the vine with them, and its wine became famous across the ancient Mediterranean. Sophocles names it in his play Philoctetes, where a lost merchant is bound for "Peparethos, rich in grapes and wine." Pliny the Elder records that a physician advising a Ptolemaic king rated Peparethian wine above all others, with one catch: it was thought undrinkable until it had aged six years. In 1936, excavators near Staphylos uncovered a royal Mycenaean tomb, the founding legend pressed into real soil.

The vines are mostly gone now. A phylloxera blight in the 1940s destroyed the old vineyards, and the island reinvented its larder. Today Skopelos is famous instead for its prunes, blue and red plums oven-dried or sun-dried, alongside almond orchards, pine honey gathered from the conifer forest, and a feta-style goat cheese folded into a spiraled, deep-fried cheese pie that is the island's signature bite. The island even keeps its own acknowledged breed of goat, the Skopelos goat, descended from the wild goats of nearby Gioura. Offshore lies one of the rarest sights in Europe: the eastern coast borders the National Marine Park of Alonnisos and the Northern Sporades, established in 1992 to protect the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seal, one of the most threatened mammals on Earth.

In the summer of 2007, film crews arrived to turn Skopelos into the fictional island of Kalokairi for the 2008 musical Mamma Mia! The most indelible shot is real: the tiny chapel of Agios Ioannis Kastri, perched alone on a sheer rock pinnacle on the island's north coast, reached only by 106 steps carved into the stone. It was here that Sophie's wedding procession climbed, and on the rocks below that Meryl Streep sang "The Winner Takes It All." The film made the chapel one of the most photographed places in Greece and put Skopelos on the map for millions who had never heard its name. Surveys still routinely rank it among the most iconic film locations in the world.

Skopelos guards a custom unusual in Greece. It is a matrilineal society, where wealth passes down the female line. By tradition, the parents of a Skopelitan bride provide the new couple with at least a house and some land, and that property stays in the bride's name. In a country where the mainland and Crete pass wealth through fathers and sons, this insular reversal has shaped the island for generations. Skopelos has drawn its share of outsiders too, among them American chef Cat Cora, born Katerina Karagiozi, and the German singer Ivan Rebroff, who kept a villa here and became an honorary citizen of the island that adopted him.

Geography keeps Skopelos wild. Two peaks rise above 500 meters, Delphi at 681 and Palouki at 546, and most of the 67-kilometer coastline is sheer cliff, inaccessible except by boat. The beaches that can be reached, Stafylos, Panormos, Milia, Kastani, have pebbles that glow pale beneath turquoise water. The main port can shut entirely when the northerly meltemi gales blow, and the island never built the airport its council once requested, so arrival is still by sea, as it has been for three thousand years. You come the slow way, watching that green saxophone grow on the horizon, and that is exactly the point.